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HISTORY OF JAVA
dear friends this history of java refered
lot of e-books and i edit & given brief history:
At first glance, it may appear that Java was developed
specifically for the world wide web. However,
interestingly enough, Java was developed independently
of the web, and went through several stages of
metamorphosis before reaching its current status
of de facto programming language for the world
wide web. Below is a brief history of Java since
its infancy to its current state. Oak According
the Java FAQ, [Harold] Bill Joy, currently a vice
president at Sun Microsystems, is widely believed
to have been the person to conceive of the idea
of a programming language that later became Java.
In late 1970's, Joy wanted to design a language
that combined the best features of MESA and C.
In an attempt to re-write the UNIX operating system
in 1980's, Joy decided that C++ was inadequate
for the job. A better tool was needed to write
short and effective programs. It was this desire
to invent a better programming tool that swayed
Joy, in 1991, in the direction of Sun's "Stealth
Project" - as named by Scott McNealy, Sun's
president.
January of 1991, Bill Joy, James Gosling,
Mike Sheradin, Patrick Naughton (formerly the
project leader of Sun's OpenWindows user environment),
and several other individuals met in Aspen, Colorado
for the first time to discuss the ideas for the
Stealth Project. The goal of the Stealth Project
was to do research in the area of application
of computers in the consumer electronics market.
The vision of the project was to develop "smart"
consumer electronic devices that could all be
centrally controlled and programmed from a handheld-remote-control-like
device. According to Gosling, "the goal was
... to build a system that would let us do a large,
distributed, heterogeneous network of consumer
electronic devices all talking to each other."
With this goal in mind, the stealth group began
work. Members of the Stealth Project, which later
became known as the Green Project, divided the
tasks amongst themselves. Mike Sheradin was to
focus on business development, Patrick Naughton
was to begin work on the graphics system, and
James Gosling was to identify the proper programming
language for the project. Gosling who had joined
Sun in 1984, had previously developed the commercially
unsuccessful NeWS windowing system as well as
GOSMACS - a C language implementation of GNU EMACS.
He began with C++, but soon after was convinced
that C++ was inadequate for this particular project.
His extensions and modifications to C++ (also
know as C++ ++ --), were the first steps towards
the development of an independent language that
would fit the project objectives. He named the
language "Oak" while staring at an oak
tree outside his office window! The name "Oak"
was later dismissed due to a patent search which
determined that the name was copyrighted and used
for another programming language. According to
Gosling, "the Java development team discovered
that Oak was the name of a programming language
that predated Sun's language, so another name
had to be chosen." "It's surprisingly
difficult to find a good name for a programming
language, as the team discovered after many hours
of brainstorming. Finally, inspiration struck
one day during a trip to the local coffee shop"
Gosling recalls. Others have speculated that the
name Java came from several individuals involved
in the project: James gosling, Arthur Van hoff,
Andy bechtolsheim. There were several criteria
that Oak had to meet in order to satisfy the project
objective given the consumer electronics target
market. Given the wide array of manufacturers
in the market, Oak would have to be completely
platform independent, and function seamlessly
regardless of the type of CPU in the device. For
this reason, Oak was designed to be an interpreted
language, since it would be practically impossible
for a complied version to run on all available
platforms. To facilitate the job of the interpreter,
Oak was to be converted to an intermediate "byte-code"
format which is then passed around across the
network, and executed/interpreted dynamically.
Additionally, reliability was of great concern.
A consumer electronics device that would have
to be "rebooted" periodically was not
acceptable.
Another important design objective for
Oak would then have to be high reliability by
allowing the least amount of programmer-introduced
errors. This was the motivation for several important
modification to C++. The concepts of multiple-inheritance
and operator overloading were identified as sources
of potential errors, and eliminated in Oak. Furthermore,
in contrast to C++, Oak included implicit garbage
collection thereby providing efficient memory
utilization and higher reliability. Finally, Oak
attempted to eliminate all unsafe constructs used
in C and C++ by only providing data structures
within objects. Another essential design criterion
was security. By design, Oak-based devices were
to function in a network and often exchange code
and information. Inherently, security is of great
concern in a networked environment, especially
in an environment as network dependent as the
conceived Oak-based systems. For this reason,
pointers were excluded in the design of Oak. This
would theoretically eliminate the possibility
of malicious programs accessing arbitrary addresses
in memory. If Oak were to be widely accepted and
used within the consumer electronics industry,
it would have to be simple and compact, so that
the language could be mastered relatively easily,
and development would not be excessively complex.
Some would argue that Oak/Java is C++ done right,
but the jury is still out on that... In April
of 1991, Ed Frank, a SPARCstation 10 architect,
joined the green project. He led the project's
hardware development effort. In two months, they
developed the first hardware prototype known as
star-seven (*7). The name *7 was somewhat demonstrative
of the project's objective. *7 was the key combination
to press on any telephone to answer any other
ringing telephone on their network. In the meantime,
Gosling was beginning work on the Oak interpreter.
By August of 1991, the team had a working prototype
of the user interface and graphical system which
was demonstrated to Sun's co-founders Scott McNealy
and Bill Joy. [O'Connell] Development of Oak,
the green OS, the user interface, and the hardware
continued through the summer of 1992. In September
of that year, the *7 prototype was complete and
demonstrated to McNealy and Joy. The prototype
was a PDA-like (personal digital assistant) device
that Gosling described as a "handheld remote
control." Patrick Naughton proclaimed that
"in 18 months, we did the equivalent of what
75-people organizations at Sun took three years
to do -- an operating system, a language, a toolkit,
an interface, a new hardware platform, ..."
While impressive, the market was not conducive
to this type of technology, as later demonstrated
by Apple's Newton PDA. The Green project's business
planner, Mike Sheradin, and hardware designer,
Ed Frank had envisioned a technology similar to
that of Dolby Labs which would become the standard
for the consumer electronics products
-ramu
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