CREATION OF JAVA
Java was concerved by James Gosling, Patrick, Naughton, Chris Warth, Ed Frank and Mike Sheridan at Sun Micro Systems incorporation in 1991. It took 18 months develop the first working version. This language was intially called “OAK”, but was renamed “JAVA” in 1995. Before the intial implementation of OAK in 1992 and the public announcement of Java in 1995, many more contributed to the design and evolution.
JAVA OVERVIEW
Java is a powerful but lean object oriented programming language. It has generated a lot of excitement because it makes it possible to program for Internet by creating applets, programs that can be embedded in Web page. The context of an applet is limited only by one’s imagination. For example, an applet can be animation with sound, an interactive game or a ticker tape with constantly updated stock prices. Applets can be just little decorations to liven up web page, or they can be serious applications like word processor or spreadsheet.
But Java is more than a programming language for writing applets. It is being used for writing standalone applicationds as well. It is becoming so popular that many people believe it will become standard language for both general purpose and Internet programming.
There are many buzzwords associated with Java, but because of its spectacular growth in popularity, a new buzzword has appeared lubiquitous. Indeed, all indications are that it will soon be everywhere.
Java builds on the strength of C++. It has taken the best features of C++ and discarded the more problamatic and error prone parts. To this lean core, it has added garbage collection (automatic memory management), multi threading (the capacity for one program to do more than one thing at a time), security capabilities. The result is that Java is simple, elegant, powerful and easy to use.
Java is actually a platform consisting of three components:
1. Java programming language.
2. Java library of classes and interfaces.
3. Java Virtual Machine.
JAVA IS PORTABLE:
One of the biggest advantages Java offers is that it is portable. An application written in Jva will run on all major platforms. Any compute with a Java based browser can run the applications or applets written in the Java programming language. A programmer no longer has to write one program to run on a Machine, and so on. In other words, with Java, developers write their programs only once.
The virtual machine is what gives Java is cross platform capabilities rather than being compiled into machine language, which is different for each Operating Systems and computer architecture, Java code is compiled into bytes codes.
With other languages, the program code is compiled into language that the computer can understand. The problem is that other computer with different machine instruction set cannot understsnd that language. Java code, on other hand is compiled into byte codes rather than machine language. These byte codes go to the Java Virtual Machine, which executes them directly or translates them into the language that is understood by the machine running it.
In summery, these means that with the JDBC API extending Java, a programmer writing Java code can access all the major relational databases on any platfotm that supports the Java Virtual Machine.
JAVA IS OBJECT-ORIENTED
The Java programming language is object oriented, which makes program design focus on what you are dealing with rather than on how you are going to do something. This makes it more useful for programming in sophisticated projects because one can break the things down into understandable components. A big benefit is that components can then be reused.
Objected oriented languages use the paradigm of classes. In simplest term, a class includes both data and functions to operate on the data. You can create an instance of a class, also called object, which will have all the data members and functionality of its class. Because of this, you can think of a class as being like template, with each object being specific instance of a particular type of class.
