History and Evolution of Java

Java is related to C++, which is a direct descendant of C.

From C Java derives its syntax.

Many of Java's object oriented features are derived from C++.

Java was conceived by James Gosling, Patrick Noughton and Chris Warth, Ed Frank and Mike Sheridan at Sun Microsystems.

It took 18 months to develop the first working version. The language was initially called "Oak", but was renamed "Java", in 1995.




The main advantage of Java over C and C++ is that it is platform independent an portable.

The explosion in the development of the world wide web meant that Java was to be the new new thing in progamming languages.

Java is neither forward comptible nor backward compatible with C++.

Java brought new dimensionality to object oriented design by integrating multi threading, and providing a library that simplified Internet access.

The Java Virtual Machine runs an optimized byte code which provides high speed.

Although Java was designed  as an interpreted language, there is nothing about Java that prevents on-the-fly compilation of bytecode into native code.

Hotspot technology was released not long after Java's initial release. Hot spot provides Just-in-Time compilation of Java's bytecode.

A short while after the release of Java, there was the advent of server side Java in the form of servlets.


Evolution

1.  Soon after the release of Java 1.0 came the release of Java 1.1
2. Java 1.1 included new library elements, new event handling mechanism, and reconfiguration of many features in the library.
3. Certain features in Java 1.0 were deprecated in Java 1.1
4. Java 2 marked the beginning of modern Java.
5. Java was now repackaged as J2SE (Java 2 Platform Standard Edition)
6. Java 2 added features like Swing and the Collections framework. 
7. The methods suspend, resume and stop were deprecated in the Thread J2.
8.  J2SE 1.3 marked the first major upgrade to the original Java 2 release.