HISTORY AND FEATURES OF JAVA

HISTORY OF JAVA

⮚ JAVA is an Object Oriented Programming language developed by James Gosling and his team in
the early 1990s.
⮚ Originally it was developed at Sun Microsystems (which is now a subsidiary of Oracle
Corporation)
⮚ The team initiated this project to develop a language for digital devices such as set-top boxes,
television, etc.
⮚ Originally C++ was considered to be used in the project but due to some drawback in the language
they decided to design a language to use in the digital devices.
⮚ The language initially was called as ‘Oak’ after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office.

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

⮚ Java name was chosen by James Gosling and his team while having coffee near his office.
⮚ Java is an island of Indonesia where the first coffee was produced (called java coffee).

FEATURES OF JAVA

⮚ The features of Java are also known

as java buzzwords. Lists of most
important features of Java language
are:

▪ Simple
▪ Object-Oriented
▪ Portable
▪ Platform independent
▪ Secured
▪ Robust
▪ Architecture neutral
▪ Compiled and Interpreted
▪ High Performance
▪ Multithreaded
▪ Distributed
▪ Dynamic

Simple: Java syntax is based on C++ (so easier for programmers to learn it after C++).
Object-Oriented: Object-oriented means we organize our software as a combination of different types
of objects that incorporates both data and behavior. Everything in Java is an object.

Portable: Java is portable because it facilitates to carry the Java byte code to any platform.

Platform independent:

● Platform means it is the hardware or software environment in which a program runs.

● There are two types of platforms software-based and hardware-based.

● Java provides a software-based platform called JVM.

● JVM (Java Virtual Machine) is an abstract machine.

● It is a specification that provides runtime environment in which java byte code can be executed.

● JVMs are available for many hardware and software platforms (i.e. JVM is platform dependent).

Secured: Java programs are secured as there is no explicit pointers and java programs run insides a virtual
machine.

Robust: Robust means rough and tough. Java is a rough and tough language because:

● It uses strong memory management.

● There is a lack of pointers that avoids security problems.

● There is an automatic garbage collection mechanism.

● There are exception handling and the type checking mechanism in Java.

Architecture neutral: Java is architecture neutral because there are no implementation dependent
features; for example, the size of primitive types is fixed. E.g it occupies 4 bytes of memory for both 32
and 64-bit architectures in Java.

Compiled & Interpreted: Java environment consists of two phases for execution of the program. During
the first phase the java compiler takes the source code written in java programming language and converts
it into java byte code. Then in the second phase the interpreter known as JVM interprets the byte code to
machine code. Thus the java program uses both the compiler and interpreter.

High Performance: Java is faster than other traditional interpreted programming languages because Java
byte code is "close" to native code.
Multithreaded: A thread is like a separate program, executing concurrently. We can write Java programs
that deal with many tasks at once by defining multiple threads. Threads are important for multi-media, Web
applications, etc.

Distributed: Distributed means a group of agents working to accomplish some goal. Each of these agents
can be distributed across multiple processes on remote hosts. Such type of programming is possible using
java. Hence java is a distributed language.

Dynamic: Java is a dynamic language. It supports dynamic loading of classes. It means classes are loaded
on demand. It also supports functions from its native languages, i.e., C and C++.

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