Today Java is one of the most popular and in-demand programming languages in the world, with over 7 million Java developers and thousands of people learning Java online (on platforms such as CodeGym and in other ways) every year because Java is universally used across industries and for a variety of business purposes.
As you may or may not know, Java has a long (almost three decades long in fact) history. Born in the early 1990s as Project Oak, originally Java was designed to become a niche programming language meant to be used in the digital cable television industry to program digital devices such as set-top boxes and smart TVs.
It took years and multiple changes to bring Java where it is now. As the saying goes, return to the root and you will find the meaning.
Knowing that the majority of people learning Java and even professional Java developers typically lack the knowledge of how Java was developed and evolved over the time, we thought it would be a good idea to explore the history of Java in more detail.
Java: the roots
Java was born in June 1991 as a project called "Oak" under the development by a small team of engineers working for Sun Microsystems. They called themselves the Green Team: James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton. And the word “Oak” was picked to name the new technology because the Oak tree is a symbol of strength and durability. Time has shown that this name ended up being very much appropriate and even prophetic despite it being changed to Javain 1995 due to the fact that Oak was already registered as part of another trademark. James Gosling was the head of the project, and his original goal was to create an object-oriented programming language that could implement a virtual machine and would be simpler and more universal than C/C++, but at the same time would have syntax similar to C/C++ to make it easy to learn and use by current programmers who are well-familiar with C notation. The new programming language was originally designed mainly for the digital cable television industry, to program the new generation of TVs with smart functions and various set-top-box devices.Java: a new hope
The development of a new programming language was finished only in 1995. And early in 1996, Sun Microsystems released the first public implementation of Java 1.0. “Java's write-once-run-everywhere capability along with its easy accessibility have propelled the software and Internet communities to embrace it as the de facto standard for writing applications for complex networks. We're delighted to invite developers to download Java 1.0 immediately and start building the next killer application," said Sun Microsystems in the press-release announcing the launch of Java. Prior to the release, in 1995, the project was renamed from Oak to Java. The reason: the original name was already a trademark by Oak Technologies. According to James Gosling, they had various other options to use as a new name, including "dynamic", "revolutionary", "jolt", and "DNA", as something that would reflect the evolutionary, dynamic and long-lasting nature of this technology. "Java was one of the top choices along with Silk," said Gosling. Eventually, while having a cup of coffee, he decided to make Java the final pick, naming the language after an island in Indonesia where the first coffee was produced.Java: revolution
Was Java really a revolution in software development at the time? Well, it would be more accurate to say that it was a much-needed solution that was rather quickly adapted by the market. The idea to use Java mainly as a cable television devices programming language was dropped somewhere in the middle of Java development as the developers realized that it is too advanced to be incorporated by the digital cable television industry at the time. Instead, Java had all the qualities required for internet programming, which was booming in the 1990s. Java was based on the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" promise, supporting free runtimes on popular platforms. It also offered a lot more security compared to C/C++, supporting configurable security options, which allowed programmers to easily limit the access to certain networks and/or files. According to the developers, they developed Java to be in line with several core principles:- Simple,
- Robust,
- Portable,
- Platform-independent,
- Secured,
- High Performance,
- Multithreaded,
- Architecture Neutral,
- Object-Oriented,
- Interpreted,
- Dynamic.
- Use the object-oriented programming methodology.
- Support executing of the same code on multiple platforms and operating systems.
- Built-in computer network support.
- Allow secure execution of code from remote sources.
- Be easy to learn and use.
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