Java is a general purpose, object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems of USA in 1991. Originally called Oak by James Gosling, one of the inventors of the language, Java was designed for the development of software for consumer electronics devices like TVs, VCRs, toasters and such other electronics machines. The goal had a strong impact on the development team to make the language simple, portable and highly reliable. The java team which included Patrick Naughton discovered that the exiting languages like C and C++ had limitation in terms of both reliability and portability. However, they modeled their new language Java on C and C++ but remove number of features of C and C++ that were considered as source of problems and thus made Java a really simple, reliable, portable, and powerful language.
The most striking feature of the Java language is that it is a platform-neutral language. Java is the first programming language that is not tied to any particular hardware or operating system. Programs developed in Java can be executed anywhere on any system. We can call Java as a revolutionary technology because it has brought in a fundamental shift in how we develop and use programs. Nothing like this happened to the software industry before.
