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Programming Languages: Java Turns 20
Happy Birthday Java! You’re no longer a teen. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Java programming language. Java was originally developed at Sun Microsystems, but after the acquisition by Oracle in early 2010, Oracle now acts as the platform’s steward and has overseen the releases of Java 7 and Java 8.
Java was first developed in the early 1990’s by James Gosling. It grew out of a project called Star7 and was later renamed Oak. The language was modeled after C++ with the intent of creating something simpler and easier to manage. In 1995 the language was renamed Java and released as a core component of the Sun Microsystem Java platform.
Georges Saab, vice president of development, Java Platform Group at Oracle, said that “Java has grown and evolved to become one of the most important and dependable technologies in our industry today. Those who have chosen Java have been rewarded many times over with increases in performance, scalability, reliability, compatibility, and functionality. The Java ecosystem offers outstanding libraries, frameworks, and resources to help programmers from novice to expert alike… With the considerable investment from Oracle and others in the community, we look forward to the next 20 years of Java’s evolution and growth.”
Jeffrey Hammond, analyst at Forrester Research, said that “it turned out ‘write once, run everywhere’ was too hard across the fragmentation of all the client-side devices, but it did work reasonably well across the less chaotic, but still segmented server architectures that the various vendors were investing in. Java’s VM turned out to be easier for most devs than writing and porting C code, and [it] had good vendor support.”
Al Hilwa, analyst for IDC, told Techworld online that “Using Java in Android was definitely something that has extended its life as a valuable skill-set and good Oracle governance in recent years has been helpful. The maturity of the technology … should not be underestimated, especially when compared with the many dynamic languages that have become popular in recent years, though have not been able to exceed Java’s adoption rate.”
The next major release of Java is scheduled for September 2016. That release will better reorganize Java with a more module architecture.
