Java History & Reasons Behind its Creation

James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton initiated the Java language project in June 1991. Java was originally designed for interactive television, but it was too advanced for the digital cable television industry at the time. Initially, the language was called Oak after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office; it went by the name Green later, and was later renamed Java, from Java coffee, said to be consumed in large quantities by the language's creators. Gosling aimed to implement a virtual machine and a language that had a familiar C/C++ style of notation.

In 1995, Sun Microsystems released the first public implementation as Java 1.0. Java runs on a variety of platforms, such as Windows, Mac OS, and the various versions of UNIX.
As of March 2014, the latest release of the Java Standard Edition is 8 (J2SE). With the advancement of Java and its widespread popularity, multiple configurations were built to suite various types of platforms. Ex: J2EE for Enterprise Applications, J2ME for Mobile Applications.

This article will take you through simple approach while learning Java Programming language.

To fully understand a new technology, one must understand the reasons behind its creation, and the forces that shaped it. Like the successful computer languages that came before, Java is a blend of the best elements of its rich heritage combined with the innovative concepts.

This article will cover following areas:

• What were the reasons behind Java creation?
• Why should we prefer Java?
• What are the prerequisites to learn Java?

We'll discuss about all the questions so that we could have a good knowledge about Java background.

What were the reasons behind Java creation?

Before Java emerged as a programming language, C++ was the dominant player in the trade. The primary goals that the creators of Java was to create a language that could tackle most of the things that C++ offered while getting rid of some of the more tedious tasks that came with the earlier languages.
The primary drawbacks of C++ were:

• It is very complex. The learning curve is steep and takes a long time to climb. For a beginner, it was very to hard to learn C & C++ because of their manual memory allocation and deallocation behavior.
• A large class of errors that neither compiler nor the run time system is required to diagnose.
• Manual memory management.

There were five primary goals in the creation of the Java language:

• It should be "simple, object-oriented and familiar with prior languages like C,C++"
• It should be "robust and secure"
• It should be "architecture-neutral and portable"
• It should execute with "high performance"

Why should we prefer Java?

• Java is easy to learn.
• Java is an Object Oriented Programming Language
• Java has Rich API to provide developer most of the functionality out of the box.
• Powerful development tools e.g. Eclipse , Netbeans
• Great collection of Open Source libraries
• Wonderful community support
• Java is Free.
• Excellent documentation support - Javadocs
• Java is Platform Independent

What are the prerequisites to learn Java?

You must be aware about what is a computer program and what is a computer programming language?

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