History of Java:

History of Java:

James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick

Naughton initiated the Java language project inJune 1991.originally designed for small, embedded systems in electronic appliances like set-top boxes.

initially called Oak and was developed as a part of the Green projectwas conceived by the effort of 5 great people, James Gosling, Patrick Naughton, Chris Warth, Mike Sheridan and Ed Frank. They all worked for Sun Microsystems, Inc and came up with Java in 1991. The language took 18 months to develop and had a initial name as "Oak" which was renamed to Java in 1995, due to copyright issues.

The idea was to develop a language which was platform-independent and which could create embedded softwares for consumer electronic devices.

 C and C++ were quite inefficient for the purpose because they were not platform-independent as there programs have to be compiled for particular hardware before execution.

 Also, the compiled code was inefficient for other processors and it had to be recompiled. So the team of 5 also called as Green Team began to work in developing a easier and cost-efficient solution. 

They worked for 18 months in developing a portable, platform-independent language that could create a code which can run on variety of processors under differing environments.

The above necessity led to creation of Java. At the same time, Internet and WWW were becoming popular day-by-day. 

The web programs lacked the features of platform-independence. 

It required programs that could run on any operating system irrespective of hardware and software configuration. 

It required small and portable programs that could be securely transported over the network. 

The programming language available to suit such requirements was Java. 

Many developers soon realized that architectural neutral language like Java would be best for writing programs for internet. 

Thus forcus of Java was shifted from consumer electronics to World Wide Web.Today, Java is not an ordinary programming language. 

It is a technology which is simple, Object Oriented, Distributed, Robust, Secure, Architecture neutral, Portable, Interpreated, Multithreaded, High Performance and Dynamic.In 1995, Oak was renamed as "Java". 

Java is just a name not an acronym.originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems(which is now a subsidiary of OracleCorporation) and released in 1995.JDK 1.0 released in(January 23, 1996).

There are many java versions that has been released.

1. JDK Alpha and Beta (1995)

2. JDK 1.0 (23rd Jan, 1996)

3. JDK 1.1 (19th Feb, 1997)

4. J2SE 1.2 (8th Dec, 1998)

5. J2SE 1.3 (8th May, 2000)

6. J2SE 1.4 (6th Feb, 2002)

7. J2SE 5.0 (30th Sep, 2004)

8. Java SE 6 (11th Dec, 2006)

9. Java SE 7 (28th July, 2011)