Gonzaga, Dominique Kyle B.

October 7, 2020

BSCS 3 – 1 Engr. Elsa S. Pascual

CSC 0212-1 Object-oriented Programming (Lec) Assignment #1

History of Java

On January 1991, Project named “Green Project” was started. Green projects goal was to
support home consumer devices. Consumer devices to be made intelligent so they can interact
with each other and they can be controlled via a remote. Bill Joy, James Gosling, Mike
Sheradin, and Patrick Naughton were the key members of the Green Project. Then on
February, James Gosling was the software lead and architect. His initial objective was to
find a suitable language for Green Project. He chose C++ and wrote extensions wherever there
were gaps. Then the features were not sufficient for the project needs and creating a new
language was the next move. He started working on the new language and named it as “Oak”,
there was an Oak tree outside his office window. When April came, SPARCstation 10’s
architect Ed Frank joins Green project to lead the hardware work. Objective was to develop
a hardware prototype and demonstrate the capabilities. The project was code named star-
seven (*7). Team members of star 7 project were Craig Forrest, Al Frazier, Ed Frank, James
Gosling, Patrick Naughton, Joe Parlang, Jon Payne, Mike Sheridan, and Chris Warth. James
Gosling works on Oak interpreter on June of 1991.

The next year on March, Oak was name of another already existing language and so
a new name was chosen and it was Java. It was inspired by coffee. Star-seven (*7) working
prototype with a GUI was completed and demonstrated on September 1992. At this time Green
project has created a new language, an operating system, a hardware platform and an
interface. Below is the demo of PDA like star 7 prototype and demo was given by James
Gosling himself. I recommend you to go through the complete demo and feel amazed on what
they have done during 1991 – 1992. During November, Green project was incorporated as a
separate entity with a name FirstPerson as a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems.

February 1993 came and FirstPerson attempts to bag order from Time-Warner for a TV
set-top box interactive system. By this time, green project was not proving successful and
Time-Warner order was also lost. From home consumer electronics the focus was shifted to TV
and set-top box related platform. By September, Arthur Van Hoff joins the team to work on
application development for the interactive platform.

Even TV interactive market on June 1994 was not fruitful for FirstPerson and it was
closed. Employees absorbed into Sun. Liveoak project started, aim was to create an operating
system by using Oak. The next month, Patrick Naughton creates a web browser and uses
Java in it. Liveoak project modified to make Oak for Internet. Naughton and Jonathan
Payne starts working on a Java based web browser named HotJava on September and this
project gets wider acceptance from the management and progresses. Java compiler was
written by Van Hoff using Java, previously it was written in C by James Gosling on October.

SunWorld conference Java and HotJava was formally introduced by Sun.

Java Duke on May 1995. In a major breakthrough on June, Netscape supports Java in its
browser. By September, the first Java developer conference was held by Sun at New York.
Oracle includes a Java compatible browser in its launch of WWW WebSystem on October. And
by December of 1995, in a first signal for wider industry acceptance, Microsoft supports Java
in IE.

January 1996 - JDK 1.0 released. February 1997 - JDK 1.1 released. Key features were
JDBC, RMI, and Inner Classes. December 1998 - JDK 1.2 code named Playground released. This
version is mostly called Java 2 and was the most popular release which witnessed major
conversions. Major features were collections framework, JIT compiler, policy tool, Java
foundation classes, Java 2D class libraries, major enhancement in JDBC. May 2000 - JDK
1.3 code named Kestrel released. February 2002 - J2SE 1.4 code named Merlin released.
Major features were XML Processing, Java Print, Logging, JDBC 3.0, Assertions, and Regular
Expressions. September 2004 - J2SE 5.0 code named Tiger released. Major features were
Generics, Autoboxing, Annotations, and Instrumentation. If you wish a detailed account of
version and its features for all Java JDK, refer my old article.

November 2006: Java was announced to be open source and it was controversial. The
way the license was designed contradicted the general open source term. May be we should
call it half-sourced. December 2006: Java SE 6 code named Mustang released. Major
features were Scripting Language Support, JDBC 4.0, Java Compiler API, and Integrated Web
Services.

January 2010 - Oracle buys Sun and its products. Now Java is in the hands of
Oracle. October 2010 - Steve Jobs says, Apple will not support Java in future. Read James
Gosling’s comment on that note by Steve Jobs.

July 2011: Java SE 7 code named Dolphin released. This release was done after 5 long
years and only this release has taken this much duration. Major features were dynamic
language support, Java nio Package, multiple exception handling, try with resources and lots
of minor enhancements.

And by 18th of March, 2014, Java SE 8 was released. This is one of the major release
in Java in its history. Major features were Lambda Expressions, Pipelines and Streams, Date
and Time API, Default Methods, Type Annotations, Nashhorn JavaScript Engine, Concurrent
Accumulators, Parallel operations, PermGen Space Removed, TLS SNI.