This article provides information about the History of Java, the Origin of Java, and the Features of Java Programming language. In recent years, Java has become one of the most popular and widely used language in the industry. Because it provides many useful features such as ease of learning, platform–independency, and high performance, it is widely accepted around the world.
History of Java Programming Language
Java is an extensively used high-level programming language designed to support the feature of Object-Oriented programming. The Java Project was started by a team named Green Team which was led by James Gosling.
Below are some points covering the History of Java –
- Originally, the language was named Oak, but it cannot be carried because it was a pre-existing trademark.
- The project for developing this language was started by a team led by James Gosling in 1991. The team was named as Green-Team.
- From the starting, they decided that the development should be platform-independent and was started by extending the C++ which was currently going on at that time.
- By 1992, a PDA device named “Star 7” was developed that was running on this Java Technology.
- In 1994, the Java compiler was first implemented in Java.
Official Release of Java
- In 1995, Java was officially released and this is marked as the releasing year for Java. The release was a huge success, because as soon as java was released Tens of thousands of downloads were held.
- In 1996, some of the APIs were added to the language including Java Media API, Telephony API, and the card API which would run on SIM cards and other smart Cards.
- By 2006, when so many new and improved APIs were added, Java was finally Open-sourced and Java SE-6 was too released in the same year.
- In 2007, Java FX was released that focused on improving Java Library using XML and replacing the earlier used swing library
- In 2008, Android was released which too used Java for its User Interface code and application development.
Java Became Oracle Product
- In 2009, Sun was taken by Oracle due to which Java became an oracle product.
- Moreover, in 2009 a Java-based game called Minecraft was released which became very popular among users.
- In the past years, Java has been developing and its new versions are being released and are one of the most commonly used programming languages.
So, the points above cover the interesting History of Java. It is widely accepted because of the very useful features that make it different from other programming languages. Some of the useful features of Java will be discussed.
Features of Java Programming Language –
Java is officially described with the following features –
- Easy to learn and understand – Java has a clean and simple coding style with the feature of commenting out the unnecessary text which makes it easy to understand for both the programmers and the readers. Many complex features are removed in Java such as Explicit pointers, storage classes goto statements, and many more. It also provides a very useful feature of the Garbage collection.
- Platform independent –This is one of the most useful and well-known features of Java which means that Java can be designed and operated on multiple machines even if they have changed in architecture. This feature of Java is known as Write once, read anywhere (WORA). Java provides this feature using the concept of Bytecode which we will discuss further.
- Object-Oriented – Java is a strongly object-oriented programming language. This means it supports the features such as inheritance, encapsulation, etc. Almost every code in Java is enclosed within Classes and is accessed by creating its instances or objects.
- Robust –This means that the language is capable of dealing with run-time errors, and also supports garbage collection. It has an efficient memory management system. The code is checked both during compile-time as well as run-time which helps in the elimination of errors.
It also provides exception handling which identifies run-time errors and eliminates them.
- Secure – Java provides the feature of security because it uses access modifiers to check memory access. Also, it does not allow a programmer to explicitly create pointers, which is not available in C/C++. Also, accessing a variable before its proper initialization is not possible. So, it enhances the feature of security.
- Multi-Threading – Threads are the pieces of code that are capable of running simultaneously. Multi-threading refers to executing multiple threads parallelly. Java executes the different threads in a time-sharing manner.
So, above we have discussed a brief history and some useful features of Java. Because of these features java gives its users an advantage over programmers using other languages.
Now time to try this Free Introduction to Java Quiz
