Lesson: Introduction to Java

Java is one of the most popular and widely used programming languages. Programmers have been using java to build desktop, web, and mobile applications such as scientific calculators, games, and everyday assistant apps. Over the years Java has proven to be fast, secure, safe, and most importantly easy to learn and understand.

Brief History of Java

Java is a programming language that was first created in 1991 by James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton, a team of engineers known as the “green team” at Sun Microsystems Inc. The java project was referred to as “Green talk” and its original file extension was .gt. It was later changed to OAK and finally renamed to “Java”.

The first public implementation of the language “Java 1.0” was released in 1996. The language promised a “write once, run anywhere” (WORA) functionality, providing no-cost run times on popular platforms. With java’s great features, major web browsers incorporated the ability to run Java applets within web pages, and Java quickly became popular.

Over the years, Java evolved and continued to grow. Currently, Java is used in internet programming, mobile devices, applications, desktop programs, games, e-business solutions, and more.

Java’s Features

1. Platform Independent: the compiler converts source code to bytecode which can be run by JVM. Different JVM exists on platforms such as Windows, Linux, and macOS. Java is platform-independent as it can run a java bytecode compiled by any platform on any similar or different platform. For example, if a program is compiled on Windows, the program can be run on macOS or Linux.
2. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) Language: Java provides the benefits of organizing software design around data and objects. Thus, it provides the four main concepts of OOP which are Abstraction, Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism.
3. Simple: Java is a simple programming language that does not require complex and tedious tasks such as pointer management, operator overloading, multiple inheritances, and Explicit memory allocation.
4. Robust: Java’s compiler is able to detect a large set of errors. It also includes automatic garbage collection, exception handling, and memory allocation. The absence of pointers in java also bypasses security dilemmas.
5. Secure: Several security flaws like stack corruption or buffer overflow are impossible to exploit in Java Also java programs run in an environment that is independent of the os(operating system) environment which makes java programs more secure.
6. Distributed: Java facilitates users to create distributed applications in java with the use of RMI and EJB.
7. Multithreading: Java supports multithreading, a feature that allows concurrent tasks to be performed within a single process.
8. Portable: Java is portable because the generated bytecode can be run on any platform.
9. High Performance: Java is faster than other traditional interpreted programming languages because the bytecode is very close to native code.
10. Dynamic: Java can load classes dynamically (on-demand) and it supports functions from its native languages (C and C++).