A Brief History of Java
Java was developed by Sun Microsystems in the
early-to-mid 1990s, and development continues
to this day, of course. Here are some of the
more important milestones in the early history of
the language:
-
1990: A team headed by James Gosling is set up
to work on a programming language for consumer
electronic devices.
-
The goals were to develop a small langauage,
that would easily adapt to new chips, and be
very reliable.
-
The language was originally known as Oak,
but that name was already used, so it had
to be changed.
-
1992: The team creates a project called Star 7 (*7),
and develops a personal, hand-held remote control.
-
The development team is incorporated as FirstPerson, Inc.,
but loses a bid to develop a TV set-top box for Time-Warner.
-
1994: The team notices the popularity of the web,
which came along in 1993, and builds first web-enabled
browser, WebRunner. Sun executives are impressed.
-
May 23, 1995: At Sun World in San Francisco
Sun Microsystems, Inc., formally announces
Java 1.0, and Netscape also announces it will
license Java for its browser.
-
1995—present: The rest of the world notices,
programmers go bananas, and the rest, as they
say, is history ...
The Major Versions of Java
-
Java 1.0 (May, 1995)
212 classes in 8 packages; the first public version
-
Java 1.1 (Early 1997)
504 classes in 23 packages; introduced inner classes,
performance improvements in the JVM, a new and improved AWT
event-handling model, the JavaBeans API, internationalization,
object serialization, and reflection
-
Java 1.2 (December, 1998)
1520 classes in 59 packages; added the new Swing GUI API
and a powerful and flexible Collections API; platform rebranded
as "The Java 2 Platform" at this stage, and the JDK (Java
Development Kit) is renamed the SDK (Software Development Kit)
-
Java 1.3 (Early 2000)
1842 classes in 76 packages;
primarily a maintenance release, focusing on bug fixes,
stability and performance improvements (including the
high-performance "HotSpot" Virtual Machine); but, also
added the JNDI (Java Naming and Directory Interface),
and the Java Sound APIs
-
Java 1.4 (2002)
2991 classes in 135 packages; another big release,
adding a new high-performance, low-level I/O API; support
for pattern matching and regular expressions; a logging API;
a user preferences API; new Collections classes; an XML-based
persistence mechanism for JavaBeans; support for XML parsing;
support for cryptography; a new API for reading and writing
image files; an API for network printing; some new Swing GUI
components; a simplified drag-and-drop architecture for Swing;
and on and on ...
-
Java 5.0 (2004)
This is the first release in a long time containing major
enhancements to the core language itself. In this release
the numbering scheme has also changed. For example, though
version 1.5.0 might have been expected, it is now simply
version 5.0. For a more complete story on the naming and
version numbering changes see
here,
and for more details on the actual changes in the new version look
here.
The actual release notes for the released version 5.0 are
here.
-
Java 6.0 (late 2006)
Although Java 6 (internally referred to as 1.6, just as
Java 5 was referred to internally as 1.5) is not nearly as
massive an upgrade as Java 5 was, Sun nevertheless says that
"Java Platform, Standard Edition 6 is a major feature release."
For more details on the changes see
here.
-
Java 7.0 (2011)
-
Java 8.0 (March, 2014)
-
Java 9.0 (summer, 2016?)
For more detail and to bring this ongoing story up to date,
check out this
Wikipedia link.
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