In June 1991, James Gosling, Mike Sheridan and Patrick Naughton originally started the project. It was originally develop for interactive television. But it was too advanced compared to the technology in that time.
Java was called Oak initially. The name Oak came from the Oak tree. An Oak tree was outside Gosling’s office. Later on the project was named Green and again renamed to Java. The name Java came from Java Coffee, a coffee from Indonesia.
The language was initially developed as a core component for Sun Microsystems. In 1996, Sun Microsystems released Java 1.0 publicly. They announced the WORA functionality. WORA stands for Write Once Run Anywhere.
Features of Java
Object Oriented Programming
Java is OOP based language. It supports all the features of OOP. Funny thing is Java is the one of the best example of OOP. Classes, Objects, Abstraction, Inheritance, Polymorphism etc are support by Java.
Portable
A source code in Java compiles into bytecode instead of raw binary. The JVM runs this byte code. For this reason, if a platform can run jvm, it can run java softwares. So, the language is highly portable.
Platform Independent
Like we already said, java souce compliles in bytecode. This byte code is not any platform specific. Java provides libraries for graphics, threading, networking. The underlying architecture takes care of them. The source code only calls methods to interact with them.
Multi Threading
Java natively supports multi threading. It has great support for multi threading applications. The application has total control on every threads it produces. And it can synchronize specific parts so that, data remains consistent.
Secure
Java is popular for security. Everything in Java platform is open source. The jvm is develop by best programmers, and is consistent. The application uses the libraries mostly. So, its highly secure.