History of Java

History of Java

The history of anything is very amusing and interesting because it is the collection of the facts that have been accumulated by the historians and the history of Java belongs to the same category. You will be fascinated to know that the Java was designed originally for the interactive television but the creators didn't realize that it was too advanced technology for the digital cable television industry back then.

The Green Team is the starting point of the history of Java. Green Team was basically the name of the team that initiated the project that would have been the best fit for digital devices such as set-top boxes, televisions, etc. Nevertheless, the language comes out to be the best suited for internet programming.

Netscape incorporated the Java Technology later in that decade.In order to create the Java language there were some principles that have been decided for creating Java programming and they "Simple, Robust, Portable, Object-Oriented, Platform-independent, High Performance, Dynamic, Architecture Neutral, Secured, Interpreted, and Multithreaded ".

James Gosling is generally known as the father of Java and the credit for developing the language goes to him and the year was 1995. The project of developing the Java language was initiated by James Gosling and his team members in the early 90's.

Who have thought that the technology that was meant for television is now being used currently in internet programming, mobile devices, games, e-business solutions, etc.

Like any history, there are some significant points that will best describe the history of Java are depicted below:

• The Java language project was started in June 1991 by James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naught. This very small team of 3 members that were part of SUN, named them the Green Team.
• This was generally designed for small, embedded systems in electronic appliances like set-top boxes and televisions in the starting phase.
• Initially, the name of the Java language was "Greentalk" that was given by the founder himself i.e. James Gosling, and the file extension name was the short of it that was .gt.
• After the initial phase, it was named as Oak and then developed as a part of the Green project.

Now the question arises why Java was named "Oak" ?

• It was called Oak because of the fact that Oak is a symbol of strength and has been chosen as the national tree of various countries like the U.S.A., France, Romania, Germany, etc.
• After the fact came out in 1995 that Oak was already a trademark by Oak Technologies then it was renamed again as "Java" as we know it now.

Now, why the name "Java" was chosen?

Everybody was wondering why the Green Team had chosen java as the name for their language? The idea behind the name Java was that the team gathered to choose a new name for their project and the suggestion began to come in and the suggested words were "dynamic", "DNA", "revolutionary", "Silk", "jolt", etc. but the team was not satisfied. They basically wanted a name that generally reflects the essence of the technology that was unique, revolutionary, cool, lively, dynamic, and easy to spell and fun to say.

Java was one of the top choices along with Silk, this was the thought or idea of the founder of the language ‘James Gosling’. As the team realized that Java is so much unique name from the numerous suggestions and this name was suggested by many of the members of the team hence Java was the name that was finalized.

Java comes from the name an island that is present in the country of Indonesia that is known as the place where the first coffee was produced and the name was java coffee. That coffee beans comes in to the category of espresso bean. This is an interesting fact that Java name was struck in the mind of James Gosling while sipping the coffee just near his office. You can notice that Java is basically a name and not an acronym. Java was developed by and founded by James Gosling at the Sun Microsystems that is now a subsidiary of the Oracle Corporation and it was released in the year 1995 for the public. Java has been awarded as the one of the Ten Best Products of 1995 by the Time magazine.

After the Java was made available for the public then the company released its first version update that is JDK 1.0 in January 23, 1996. There have been many additional features and changes that has been added to the language since the initial release of the Java. Nowadays, Java is one of the most popular language that is being used in Windows applications, Web applications, mobile applications, enterprise applications, cards, etc. It is a characteristic of Java that there are new features that are added in to each of the new version.

Version History of Java

As we have learned the history of Java, here is the list of the versions of the Java that have been released till now. Please note that the current stable release of the Java is Java SE 10.

• JDK Alpha and Beta (1995)
• JDK 1.0 (1996)
• JDK 1.1 (1997)
• J2SE 1.2 (1998)
• J2SE 1.3 (2000)
• J2SE 1.4 (2002)
• J2SE 5.0 (2004)
• Java SE 6 (2006)
• Java SE 7 (2011)
• Java SE 8 (2014)
• Java SE 9 (2017)
• Java SE 10 (2018)
• Java SE 11(Upcoming Version)