Java Introduction

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

 Java is free to download. Get the latest version at java.com. or from www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index.html

If you are building an embedded or consumer device and would like to include Java, please contact Oracle for more information on including Java in your device

Gosling is generally credited with having invented the Java programming language in 1994. He created the original design of Java and implemented the language's original compiler and virtual machine. Gosling traces the origins of the approach to his early graduate-student days, when he created a pseudo-code (p-code) virtual machine for the lab's DEC VAX computer, so that his professor could run programs written in U C SD Pascal. Pascal compiled into p-code to foster precisely this kind of portability. In the work leading to Java at Sun, he saw that architecture-neutral execution for widely distributed programs could be achieved by implementing a similar philosophy: always program for the same virtual machine.
For his achievement the National Academy of Engineering in the United States elected him as a Foreign Associate member. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. He co-wrote the "bundle" program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book The Unix Programming Environment.