Java

Java Programming Language

The Java programming language process was initiated in 1991 by James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton and was originally designed for interactive television and kitchen stuff. The language was initially called Oak after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling’s office; it went by the name Green later, and was later renamed Java, from Java coffee, said to be consumed in large quantities by the language’s creators.

The first release of Java was Java 1.0 in 1995. The language derives from C++, and has a simple object model and fewer low-level facilities. Java applications are compiled into .class files (eg. bytecode) and runs on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

The main principle in creation of Java was : “Write once, run anywhere!”. So, in the creation of JAVA there were five primary goals:

  • it should be simple, object-oriented and familiar;
  • it should be robust and secure;
  • it should be architecture-neutral and portable;
  • it should be interpreted, threaded, and dynamic;
  • it should execute with high performance.

Take a look to the major release versions of JAVA:

# Java Version
1 JDK 1.0 (January 23, 1996)
2 JDK 1.1 (February 19, 1997)
3 J2SE 1.2 (December 8, 1998)
4 J2SE 1.3 (May 8, 2000)
5 J2SE 1.4 (February 6, 2002)
6 J2SE 5.0 (September 30, 2004)
7 Java SE 6 (December 11, 2006)
8 Java SE 7 (July 28, 2011)
9 Java SE 8 (March 18, 2014)
10 Java SE 9 (September 21, 2017)

One characteristic of Java is portability, which means that computer programs written in the Java language must run similarly on any hardware/operating-system platform. This is achieved by compiling the Java language code to an intermediate representation called Java bytecode, instead of directly to platform-specific machine code. Java bytecode instructions are analogous to machine code, but are intended to be interpreted by a virtual machine (VM) written specifically for the host hardware. End-users commonly use a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on their own machine for standalone Java applications, or in a Web browser for Java applets.

Reference Source : Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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