History of Java

History of Java

James Gosling initiated Java language project in June 1991 for use in one of his many set-top box projects. The language, initially called ‘Oak’ after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office, also went by the name ‘Green’ and ended up later being renamed as Java, from a list of random words.

Sun released the first public implementation as Java 1.0 in 1995. It promised Write Once, Run Anywhere (WORA), providing no-cost run-times on popular platforms.

On 13 November, 2006, Sun released much of Java as free and open source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

On 8 May, 2007, Sun finished the process, making all of Java's core code free and open-source, aside from a small portion of code to which Sun did not hold the copyright.

Popular Java Editors

To write your Java programs, you will need a text editor. There are even more sophisticated IDEs available in the market. But for now, you can consider one of the following −

Ø  Notepad − On Windows machine, you can use any simple text editor like Notepad (Recommended for this tutorial), TextPad.

Ø  Netbeans − A Java IDE that is open-source and free which can be downloaded from https://www.netbeans.org/index.html.

Ø  Eclipse − A Java IDE developed by the eclipse open-source community and can be downloaded from https://www.eclipse.org/.

Byte code

Programming code that, once compiled, is run through a virtual machine instead of the computes processor. Bytecode is the compiled format for Java programs. Once a Java program has been converted to bytecode, it can be transferred across a network and executed by JavaVirtual Machine (JVM).