Java

Revision as of 02:27, 3 June 2014

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems (which has since merged into Oracle Corporation) based on an earlier project to develop a programming language for embedded cable television systems, and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++, but it has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode (class file) that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture. Java is a general-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented language that is specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers "write once, run anywhere" (WORA), meaning that code that runs on one platform does not need to be recompiled to run on another. The Jar format (zipped Java classes) is used by Java in addition to .jar and .class files.

JavaScript is unrelated, other than a slight syntactic similarity, since it is a name applied for marketing purposes to a scripting language developed at Netscape when they decided attaching it to the Java craze would help its popularity.

References

• Java (Wikipedia)
• Ant: tool for building Java applications
• Java apparently has the planned obsolescence of a built-in expiration date.