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Java Introductory Concepts

Java Background

History — Emergence of Java

Sun Microsystem had noticed the change in demand for software that was occurring in the early 1990s. And since their operating system, solaris, was bundled with hardware for free, they needed to find another way to sell software which was the current market demand.

The main objective of the language was the possibility of multi-platform execution, the slogan WORA summed up this intention well. (Write once, run anywhere) → which in Portuguese would be like write once, run anywhere.

The popularization of the language is also due to the profitable potential provided by the promising beginnings of the first web pages. Sun saw Java as a possibility to boost interactivity and animations on web pages.

Example of current language usage:

The idea to solve this problem was to write executable code that could be "understood" by any device thanks to the intervention of a virtual machine that would run on a physical device. This virtual machine was the intermediary between the executable code and the target physical device. This dealt with the main problem at the time: the need to rewrite code for each device and/or each change made to devices that already existed. But the idea was discontinued because it would cost too much to develop a chip to be integrated into each electronic device.

Due to the explosion of the web in the mid-90s, the same problem of incompatibility between systems was relocated to the context of browsers and operating systems. This is because, at that time, each program was almost necessarily tied to a platform and this made things difficult in terms of portability.

Java Platform

When it first appeared, the Java language stood out for the following characteristics: