History of Java

The Java platform and language began as an internal project at Sun Microsystems in December 1990, providing an alternative to the C++/C programming languages. Engineer Patrick Naughton, James Gosling and Mike Sheridan were attempting to develop a new technology for programming next generation smart appliances (like set-top boxes!), which Sun expected to be a major new opportunity. It was called the Green project.

James Gosling -Father of Java

The team originally considered using C++, but it was rejected for several reasons as follows:

Because they were developing an embedded system with limited resources, they decided that C++ demanded too large a footprint and that its complexity led to developer errors.
C/C++ does not have garbage collection. This means that programmers have to manually manage system memory - a difficult and error-prone task.
C/C++ also suffered from lack of portable facilities for security, distributed programming, and threading.
Finally, they wanted a platform that could be easily ported to all types of devices.

Initially, Gosling attempted to modify and extend C++ but soon abandoned that in favor of creating an entirely new language, which he called Oak, after the tree that stood just outside his office.

By the September of 1992, they were able to demonstrate portions of the new platform including the Green OS, the Oak language, the libraries, and the hardware.

Java was initially developed to write software for consumer electronic products like television, ovens etc. Later with the development of Internet and World Wide Web there was a need for a programming language that is platform independent, So Java gained popularity and became one of most popular language for Internet programming.

Java meets Internet

In June and July 1994, John Gage, the Director of Science for Sun, Gosling, Joy, Naughton, Wayne Rosing, and Eric Schmidt (the now CEO of Google) re-targeted the platform for the World Wide Web. With the arrival of the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, they felt the Internet was on its way to evolving into a powerful, highly interactive medium. As a prototype, Naughton wrote a small browser, WebRunner, later renamed HotJava.
That year, the language was renamed Java after a trademark search revealed that Oak was used by another company. The first public release of Java and the HotJava browser was on 23 May 1995. Netscape browsers started to include Java support. On 9 January 1996, the JavaSoft group was formed by Sun Microsystems in order to develop the technology.

Major Java Versions

JDK (Java Development Kit) 1.0 was released on (January 23, 1996), JDK 1.1 was released on February 19, 1997. Major altereations were on the AWT event model, inner classes, JavaBeans and JDBC were added to the language.

J2SE 1.2 (December 8, 1998) — This and subsequent releases were rebranded Java 2. The version name "J2SE" (Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition) was used instead of JDK. J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) and J2ME (Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition) were available. Major additions included reflection, a Collections framework and the integration of the Swing graphical API into the core classes. Sun's JVM was equipped with a JIT compiler for the first time.

J2SE 1.3 (May 8, 2000) - Notable changes included the bundling of the HotSpot JVM, Java Sound, Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) and Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA).

J2SE 1.4 (February 6, 2002) — regular expressions modeled after Perl, exception chaining, an integrated XML parser and XSLT processor (JAXP), and Java Web Start.

J2SE 5.0 (September 30, 2004) — Internal version numbered 1.5. A number of significant new language features include the for-each loop, generics, autoboxing and var-args.

The current version, Java SE 6 (December 11, 2006) — is bundled with a database manager, facilitates the use of scripting languages (currently JavaScript) with the JVM and has Visual Basic language support.

As of this version, Sun replaced the name "J2SE" with Java SE and dropped the ".0" from the version number 6.0. Lots of GUI improvements including native UI enhancements to support the look and feel of Windows Vista and improvements to the Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA) & JVM Tool Interface for better debuging were new featuers.