What is Java?

Quoting Wikipedia:

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems (which is now a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation) and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode (class file) that can run on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture. Java is general-purpose, concurrent, class-based, and object-oriented, and is specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers "write once, run anywhere". Java is considered by many as one of the most influential programming languages of the 20th century, and widely used from application software to web application.

There were five primary goals in the creation of the Java language:

• It should be "simple, object oriented, and familiar".
• It should be "robust and secure".
• It should be "architecture neutral and portable".
• It should execute with "high performance".
• It should be "interpreted, threaded, and dynamic".
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Syntax

The syntax of Java is largely derived from C++. Unlike C++, which combines the syntax for structured, generic, and object-oriented programming, Java was built almost exclusively as an object oriented language. All code is written inside a class and everything is an object, with the exception of the intrinsic data types (ordinal and real numbers, boolean values, and characters), which are not classes for performance reasons.

See also

• Comparison of programming languages
• Comparison of Java and C++
• Comparison of Java and C#
• List of Java virtual machines
• List of Java APIs
• List of JVM languages
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Official Website:

http://www.java.com/en/