What is java ? and what is java used for? and its history.

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What is Java

Java is a general-purpose, concurrent, object-oriented, class-based, and the runtime environment(JRE) which consists of JVM which is the cornerstone of the Java platform. This blog on What is Java will clear all your doubts about why to learn java, features and how it works.

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995.

It is an object-oriented language similar to C++, but with advanced and simplified features. Java is free to access and can run on all platforms.

Java is a write-once, run-anywhere (WORA)  programming language 

For example, you can write and compile a Java program on UNIX and run it on Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, or UNIX machine without any modifications to the source code. WORA is achieved by compiling a Java program into an intermediate language called bytecode. The format of bytecode is platform-independent. A virtual machine, called the java virtual machine(JVM) , is used to run the bytecode on each platform.

Java with a lot of technologies like Spring, node js, Android, Hadoop, J2EE, etc… to build robust, scalable, portable and distributed full-fledged applications. Java also promotes continuous integration and testing using tools like Selenium.

History of Java

Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems (which has since been acquired by Oracle Corporation) 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.

Oracle Corporation is the current owner of the official implementation of the Java SE platform, following their acquisition of Sun Microsystems on January 27, 2010. This implementation is based on the original implementation of Java by Sun. The Oracle implementation is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris.

The Oracle implementation is packaged into two different distributions:

  • Java Runtime Environment (JRE) which contains the parts of the Java SE platform required to run Java programs and is intended for end users.
  • Java Development Kit (JDK) which is intended for software developers and includes development tools such as the Java compiler, Javadoc, Jar, and a debugger.
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What is java used  for?

  • Banking: To deal with transaction management.
  • Retail: Billing applications that you see in a store/restaurant are completely written in Java.
  • Information Technology: Java is designed to solve implementation dependencies.
  • Android: Applications are either written in Java or use Java API.
  • Financial services: It is used in server-side applications.
  • Stock market: To write algorithms as to which company they should invest in.  
  • Big Data: Hadoop MapReduce framework is written using Java.
  • Scientific and Research Community: To deal with huge amount of data.  
Features of Java
  • Platform independent language
  • Rich standard library making it easy to code. You can create a whole stand-alone application using Java.
  • Java supports automatic memory allocation and deallocation (called garbage collection).
  • It offers great performance as Java supports multithreading and concurrency, thus making it a highly interactive and responsive language.
  • Secure and simple
  • Platform independent - Java is a general-purpose language with a wide range of applications. It's used for developing mobile and desktop applications, big data processing, embedded systems, and so on.e can write Java code in one platform (operating system) and run on another platform without any modification.
  • Object-oriented - Java is an object-oriented language. This helps to make our Java code more flexible and reusable.
  • Speed - Well optimized Java code is nearly as fast as lower-level languages like C++ and much faster than Python, PHP, etc.

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