On occasion, people may think that the Java programming language was built for the web, but this is not the case. Its design and development was indeed independent of the web; going through various stages of metamorphosis at sun microsystems to reach the current status of the web’s de facto World Wide Web programming language (Gosling & Yellin, 1996). With the Java programming language, its developers, Sun Microsystems, were able to establish a pioneering programming language which was not in any way tied to a specific programming language, or even a microprocessor for that matter. It was the beginning of exciting things in the world of programming.
Java evolved from a programming language known as Oak (Gosling & Yellin, 1996). It was developed by James Gosling of Sun Microsystems. Even though the language was first released in 1995, development of its virtual machines, implementation compilers, and class libraries started in 1991 at Sun Microsystems (Gosling & Yellin, 1996). The original language, called Oak, was designed and developed out of the need to have a platform –independent language on which entertainment appliances like game consoles and others like VCRs would communicate (Lemay & Perkins, 1996). Originally slated to work on television set-top boxes; with the aim of providing video-on-demand services. However, this was not to be. The language was too advanced for the devices at the time. Nonetheless, that failure did not stop the development, and the evolution of the programming language; that is the time the World Wide Web was being launched. Oak developers realized the potential the language would have on the web and shifted their focus to WebRunner and the internet. WebRunner was an Oak enabled web browser. The names would later change to Java, and the former became HotJava web browser. The internet brought about a lot of excitement, mainly from software vendors; who quickly came up with development tools for the Java Programming language. This was the impetus on which the language grew and became popular.
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The Java Programming Language offers great benefits to developers, software vendors, and tech-gadget manufacturers (Lemay & Perkins, 1996). One of the first benefits that the language has, is platform independence. This means that compilers in Java do not come up with native object code on different platforms or operating systems but instead produce “bytecodes”, which are instructions meant to run on Java Virtual Machines (Lemay & Perkins, 1996). This means that the compiled bytecodes can run unmodified on platforms that can support the Java programming language. The next benefit that the Java Programming language offers is object orientation (Lemay & Perkins, 1996). Everything in the language is handled as an object that descends from the root object classes. Java also has a rich standard library. It has hundreds of methods and classes which are divided into six main functional areas: utility classes, language support classes, I/O Classes, networking classes, the Applet class, and the Abstract Window Toolkit. The Applet class allows for the development of Java programs, which can be downloaded by users and run on client browsers. The language’s syntax is also similar to C++ syntax hence it was easily adopted by developers. Lastly, Java has in-built garbage collection libraries; and does not require developers to free allocated memory explicitly. The result is that programs become less prone to errors of the memory.
Java has components that help in the formation of graphical user interfaces. The first is the Java Swing; which is a Graphical User Interface library of classes (Lemay & Perkins, 1996). Java Swing contains classes that control frames, buttons, text boxes, panes, and so on. There are methods that control the actions linked to the objects created by the classes made available by the Swing Class libraries. There are layouts that control how objects are arranged or organized in a pane or a window.
Java has gone through refinement and transformations as a programming language and is today applied in different ways; including the development of mobile phone applications as well as applications for smartphones. The android platform makes use of the java programming language extensively; in the development of native applications to run on Android enabled devices. This has been made possible by the various benefits of the language mentioned previously.
- Gosling, J., & Yellin, F. (1996). The Java Application Programming Interface (Java Series). Longman Publishing Group.
- Lemay, L., & Perkins, C. L. (1996). Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days. Sams.
