What is Java

What is Java

The history of Java is very interesting. Java was originally designed for interactive television, but it was too advanced technology for the digital cable television industry at the time. The history of java starts with Green Team. Java team members (also known as Green Team), initiated this project to develop a language for digital devices such as set-top boxes, televisions etc. But, it was suited for internet programming. Later, Java technology was incorporated by Netscape.

The principles for creating Java programming were "Simple, Robust, Portable, Platform-independent, Secured, High Performance, Multithreaded, Architecture Neutral, Object-Oriented, Interpreted and Dynamic".

Currently, Java is used in internet programming, mobile devices, games, e-business solutions etc. There are given the major points that describe the history of java.

1) James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton initiated the Java language project in June 1991. The small team of sun engineers called Green Team.

2) Originally designed for small, embedded systems in electronic appliances like set-top boxes.

3) Firstly, it was called "Greentalk" by James Gosling and file extension was .gt.

4) After that, it was called Oak and was developed as a part of the Green project.

Why Java named as "Oak"

5) Why Oak? Oak is a symbol of strength and chosen as a national tree of many countries like U.S.A., France, Germany, Romania etc.

6) In 1995, Oak was renamed as "Java" because it was already a trademark by Oak Technologies.

Why Java Programming named as "Java"

7) Why had they chosen java name for java language? The team gathered to choose a new name. The suggested words were "dynamic", "revolutionary", "Silk", "jolt", "DNA" etc. They wanted something that reflected the essence of the technology: revolutionary, dynamic, lively, cool, unique, and easy to spell and fun to say.

According to James Gosling, "Java was one of the top choices along with Silk". Since Java was so unique, most of the team members preferred java.

8) Java is an island of Indonesia where first coffee was produced (called java coffee).

9) Notice that Java is just a name, not an acronym.

10) Originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems (which is now a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation) and released in 1995.

11) In 1995, Time magazine called Java one of the Ten Best Products of 1995.

12) JDK 1.0 released in(January 23, 1996).

Java Version History

There are many java versions that have been released. The current stable release of Java is Java SE 10.

1. JDK Alpha and Beta (1995)
2. JDK 1.0 (23rd Jan 1996)
3. JDK 1.1 (19th Feb 1997)
4. J2SE 1.2 (8th Dec 1998)
5. J2SE 1.3 (8th May 2000)
6. J2SE 1.4 (6th Feb 2002)
7. J2SE 5.0 (30th Sep 2004)
8. Java SE 6 (11th Dec 2006)
9. Java SE 7 (28th July 2011)
10. Java SE 8 (18th March 2014)
11. Java SE 9 (21st Sep 2017)
12. Java SE 10 (20th March 2018)

Download JDK

For running Java programs in your system you will have to download and install JDK kit from here (current version is JDK 1.8).

Features of Java

The prime reason behind the creation of Java was to bring portability and security feature into a computer language. Besides these two major features, there were many other features that played an important role in molding out the final form of this outstanding language. Those features are :

1) Simple

Java is easy to learn and its syntax is quite simple, clean and easy to understand. The confusing and ambiguous concepts of C++ are either left out in Java or they have been re-implemented in a cleaner way.

Eg: Pointers and Operator Overloading are not there in java but were an important part of C++.

2) Object Oriented

In java, everything is Object which has some data and behavior. Java can be easily extended as it is based on the Object Model.

3) Robust

Java makes an effort to eliminate error-prone codes by emphasizing mainly on compile-time error checking and runtime checking. But the main areas which Java improved were Memory Management and mishandled Exceptions by introducing automatic Garbage Collector and Exception Handling.

4) Platform Independent

Unlike other programming languages such as C, C++ etc which are compiled into platform specific machines. Java is guaranteed to be write-once, run-anywhere language.

On compilation, Java program is compiled into bytecode. This bytecode is platform independent and can be run on any machine, plus this bytecode format also provides security. Any machine with Java Runtime Environment can run Java Programs.

5) Secure

When it comes to security, Java is always the first choice. With java secure features it enables us to develop virus-free, temper free system. Java program always runs in Java runtime environment with almost null interaction with system OS, hence it is more secure.

6) Multi-threading

Java multithreading feature makes it possible to write a program that can do many tasks simultaneously. The benefit of multithreading is that it utilizes the same memory and other resources to execute multiple threads at the same time, like While typing, grammatical errors are checked along.

7) Architectural Neutral

The compiler generates bytecodes, which have nothing to do with a particular computer architecture, hence a Java program is easy to interpret on any machine.

8) Portable

Java Bytecode can be carried to any platform. No implementation-dependent features. Everything related to storage is predefined, example: size of primitive data types

9) High Performance

Java is an interpreted language, so it will never be as fast as a compiled language like C or C++. But, Java enables high performance with the use of the just-in-time compiler.

New Features of JAVA 8

Below mentioned are some of the core upgrades done as a part of Java 8 release. Just go through them quickly, we will explore them in details later.

• Enhanced Productivity by providing Optional Classes feature, Lambda Expressions, Streams etc.
• Ease of Use
• Improved Polyglot programming. A Polyglot is a program or script, written in a form which is valid in multiple programming languages and it performs the same operations in multiple programming languages. So Java now supports such type of programming technique.
• Improved Security and performance.