Java is a programming language developed by James Gosling from Sun Microsystems in 1991. Their intention was, to write a program once and then run this program on multiple operating systems. The first version of Java (Java 1.0) was released in 1995. Sun Microsystems was acquired by the Oracle Corporation in 2010.
Please do not confuse with java's versioning analogy, Java 1.8 is also known as Java 8.
Platform independent: Java programs use the Java virtual machine as abstraction and do not access the operating system directly. This makes Java programs highly portable. A Java program (which is standard-compliant and follows certain rules) can run unmodified on all supported platforms, e.g., Windows or Linux.
Basic features:
- Object-orientated programming language: Except the primitive data types(int, float, char, boolean), all elements in Java are objects.
- Strongly-typed programming language: Java is strongly-typed, e.g., the types of the used variables must be pre-defined and conversion to other objects is relatively strict, e.g., must be done in most cases by the programmer.
- Interpreted and compiled language: Java source code is compiled into the bytecode format which does not depend on the target platform. These bytecode instructions will be interpreted by the Java Virtual machine (JVM).
- Automatic memory management: Java manages the memory allocation and de-allocation for creating new objects. The program does not have direct access to the memory. The so-called garbage collector automatically deletes objects to which no active pointer exists.
The Java syntax is similar to C++.
Java is case-sensitive, e.g., variables
myValue
and myvalue
are treated as different variables.
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