Basics of Java ~ mkniit

Overview of Java

Java is one of the world's most important and widely used computer languages, and it has held this distinction for many years. Unlike some other computer languages whose influence has weared with passage of time, while Java's has grown.

As of 2015, Java is one of the most popular programming languages in use, particularly for client-server web applications, with a reported 9 million developers using and working on it.

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Creation of Java

Java was developed by James Ghosling, Patrick Naughton, Mike Sheridan at Sun Microsystems Inc. in 1991. It took 18 months to develop the first working version.

The initial name was Oak but it was renamed to Java in 1995 as OAK was a registered trademark of another Tech company.

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Evolution of Java

Java was initially launched as Java 1.0 but soon after its initial release, Java 1.1 was launched. Java 1.1 redefined event handling, new library elements were added.

In Java 1.2 Swing and Collection framework was added and suspend(), resume() and stop() methods were deprecated from Thread class.

No major changes were made into Java 1.3 but the next release that was Java 1.4 contained several important changes. Keyword assert, chained exceptions and channel based I/O System was introduced.

Java 1.5 was called J2SE 5, it added following major new features :

• Generics
• Annotations
• Autoboxing and autounboxing
• Enumerations
• For-each Loop
• Varargs
• Static Import
• Formatted I/O
• Concurrency utilities

Next major release was Java SE 7 which included many new changes, like :

• Now String can be used to control Switch statement.
• Multi Catch Exception
• try-with-resource statement
• Binary Integer Literals
• Underscore in numeric literals, etc.

And the latest addition to the lot is, Java SE 8, it was released on March 18, 2014. Some of the major new features introduced in JAVA 8 are,

• Lambda Expressions
• New Collection Package java.util.stream to provide Stream API.
• Enhanced Security
• Nashorn Javascript Engine included
• Parallel Array Sorting
• The JDBC-ODBC Bridge has been removed etc.

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Application of Java

Java is widely used in every corner of world and of human life. Java is not only used in softwares but is also widely used in designing hardware controlling software components. There are more than 930 million JRE downloads each year and 3 billion mobile phones run java.

Following are some other usage of Java :

1. Developing Desktop Applications
2. Web Applications like Linkedin.com, Snapdeal.com etc
3. Mobile Operating System like Android
4. Embedded Systems
5. Robotics and games etc.

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Download JDK

For running Java programs in your system you will have to download and install JDK kit from here (current version is jdk 1.8).