Java History

Java History

Before learning any thing its always good  to understand Why,How,When it involves and developed.

At first glance, it may appear that Java was developed specifically for the world wide web. However, interestingly enough, Java was developed independently of the web, and went through several stages of metamorphosis before reaching its current status of de facto programming language for the world wide web.
 In year 1991 , project named "Green Project" started , its goal to support home supplementary consumer devices which we can control with help of Remote. Bill Joy, James Gosling, Mike Sheradin, Patrick Naughton were the key members of the Green Project.

January, 1991

Project named “Green Project” was started. Green project’s goal was to support home consumer devices. Consumer devices to be made intelliegent so they can interact with each other and they can be controlled via a remote. Bill Joy, James Gosling, Mike Sheradin, Patrick Naughton were the key members of the Green Project.
 In January of 1991, Bill Joy, James Gosling, Mike Sheradin, Patrick Naughton (formerly the project leader of Sun's OpenWindows user environment), and several other individuals met in Aspen, Colorado for the first time to discuss the ideas for the Stealth Project. The goal of the Stealth Project was to do research in the area of application of computers in the consumer electronics market. The vision of the project was to develop "smart" consumer electronic devices that could all be centrally controlled and programmed from a handheld-remote-control-like device. According to Gosling, "the goal was ... to build a system that would let us do a large, distributed, heterogeneous network of consumer electronic devices all talking to each other." With this goal in mind, the stealth group began work.

It's surprisingly difficult to find a good name for a programming language, as the team discovered after many hours of brainstorming. Finally, inspiration struck one day during a trip to the local coffee shop" Gosling recalls. Others have speculated that the name Java came from several individuals involved in the project: James gosling, Arthur Van hoff, Andy bechtolsheim.
There were several criteria that Oak had to meet in order to satisfy the project objective given the consumer electronics target market. Given the wide array of manufacturers in the market, Oak would have to be completely platform independent, and function seamlessly regardless of the type of CPU in the device. For this reason, Oak was designed to be an interpreted language, since it would be practically impossible for a complied version to run on all available platforms. To facilitate the job of the interpreter, Oak was to be converted to an intermediate "byte-code" format which is then passed around across the network, and executed/interpreted dynamically.
Additionally, reliability was of great concern. A consumer electronics device that would have to be "rebooted" periodically was not acceptable. Another important design objective for Oak would then have to be high reliability by allowing the least amount of programmer-introduced errors. This was the motivation for several important modification to C++. The concepts of multiple-inheritance and operator overloading were identified as sources of potential errors, and eliminated in Oak. Furthermore, in contrast to C++, Oak included implicit garbage collection thereby providing efficient memory utilization and higher reliability. Finally, Oak attempted to eliminate all unsafe constructs used in C and C++ by only providing data structures within objects.
Another essential design criterion was security. By design, Oak-based devices were to function in a network and often exchange code and information. Inherently, security is of great concern in a networked environment, especially in an environment as network dependent as the conceived Oak-based systems. For this reason, pointers were excluded in the design of Oak. This would theoretically eliminate the possibility of malicious programs accessing arbitrary addresses in memory.