OVERVIEW OF THE JAVA PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
All applications that run on computers--whether word processing programs, Internet pages, games or any other application--use some type of programming instructions to tell the computer how the application should be processed. In the earliest days of computers, programmers had to rely on machine code--combinations of 0s and 1s--that eventually gave rise to assembly language and then higher-level languages such as COBOL and FORTRAN. The programming languages C and C++ evolved from these higher level languages as developers sought more powerful programming languages that were also relatively easy to use and deploy. This research examines the development and deployment of a recent programming language, Java, and its future potential.
Java was developed by a small group of professionals at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. At that time, C++ was the programming language in wide use at Sun, and it was considered a powerful programming language and entirely appropriate for the tasks that it had to perform. However, high-level languages such as C++ require compilers. These are programs that translate the high-level language useful for humans into lower-level instructions that can be understood by the computer. Although Sun Microsystems was a manufacturer of computer hardware, its developers were interested in developing a language that would not have to be recompiled in order to run on different hardware platforms. Thus, they were seeking a version of C++ that would run on different machines without having to be recompiled. This would save resource time as well as cost (Langley 56).
Initially, the development team worked in complete secrecy within the Sun company. Limited to a project team of eight, anyone within the company who wanted to know about the project was required to sign a nondisclosure agreement. At the same time, the developers moved to an off-site location in order t...