History of Java

The roots of Java can be traced to an effort by Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems, in the 1980s to rewrite the Unix operating system. The effort switched to a project called Stealth. Stealth’s mission was to research the application of computers in the consumer electronics market. They needed to be centrally controlled and able to work on various systems. The eventual goal, attributed to James Gosling, was to build a large and distributed heterogeneous network of consumer electronic devices that could talk to each other.

Gosling was given the task to identify or develop a language for the project. He first began working with C but soon discovered that it was not adequate for the task. A new language was developed with the stated attributes and that built on the strengths of other languages He named the language Oak because of a large oak tree outside his office. Sun then realized that a major market existed in the Internet and ported Java for applications there. It has now become a very powerful language for all applications ranging from applets to stand alone applications. The meeting during which the name, java, was decided, was conducted in a coffee shop.

The course is taught using the free Eclipse compiler. Because of its recognized strengths, this language has been selected by the AP Computer Science board to be the advanced placement language beginning in 2003. Areas discussed include history and architecture of computers and the language, creation of applets and applications, control structures, methods, arrays, Internet applications, and object-oriented programming. Swing, the latest graphics package, is used extensively in the course. The strong graphics capabilities of the language are stressed