History of Java
Java is the most widely used high-level programming language. Beginning in the early 1990s, Java has a long and fascinating history. Java programming language was originally developed by James Gosling and a team of engineers at Sun Microsystems, with the goal of creating a portable and secure programming language for consumer electronics devices, such as set-top boxes and handheld devices.
At first, the team thought about utilizing C++, but ultimately decided against it because of its complexity and resource requirements. Instead, they decided to design a new language that would be simpler, more efficient, and more secure.
In this section, we will explore a brief history of Java, from its origins to its evolution into a versatile and powerful language:
1991: James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems start developing a new programming language for consumer electronics devices.
1992: The language is initially called Oak, but due to trademark conflicts, they renamed it Java.
1995: The first version of Java is released.
1996: Java applets become popular, and Java is used to develop some of the first interactive web applications.
1997: Java 1.1 is released, adding support for Swing and JavaBeans.
1998: Java 1.2 is released, adding support for CORBA and JDBC.
1999: Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is released, providing a platform for developing enterprise applications.
2000: Java 1.3 is released, adding support for XML and JavaServer Pages (JSP).
2001: Java 1.4 is released, adding support for regular expressions and assertions.
2002: Java 1.5 is released, adding support for generics, enums, and autoboxing.
2004: Java 1.6 is released, adding support for annotations and scripting.
2006: Java 1.7 is released, adding support for try-with-resources and dynamic languages.
2011: Java 1.7 is released, adding support for closures and lazy initialization.
2014: Java 8 is released, adding support for lambdas, streams, and the default method pattern.
2017: Java 9 is released, adding support for modules and the Java Platform Module System (JPMS).
2018: Java 10 is released, adding support for local variable type inference and the var keyword.
2019: Java 11 is released, adding support for dynamic class-path resolution and the HttpClient API.
2020: Java 16 is released, adding support for records and the sealed classes and interfaces feature.
2021: Java 17 is released, adding support for switch expressions and the text blocks feature.
2022: Java 18 is released, adding support for structured concurrency and the record patterns feature.