IBM Outlines Prospects for Java in 2018

By: Chris Preimesberger
Published on: 01/19/2018

There may be no more pervasive computer code anywhere in the world than Java, created by Dr. James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun's Java Platform. And there are good reasons for this.

For the record: Java is a general-purpose computer programming language that is concurrent, class-based, object-oriented and specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. This is why it has not been passed by despite so many advancements in IT during the 23 years it has been a major factor in the IT world.

It's everywhere-in virtually every mobile device, server, IT system and network. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture.

Oracle, which acquired Sun in 2010, is the ostensible home base for most Java development, but the language really belongs to its own community.

Handheld Devices, PCs and 'Big Hunk' Servers All Look the Same in Java

A good way to describe Java comes from Dr. Gosling himself: "You line up a small mobile device (like a smartphone), a desktop computer, and a 'big hunk' server...and they all look the same in Java," he told me.

Bingo. Now you have a better picture of what Java does; it enables all these things to talk to each other, despite type of device, network, telecommunications provider, application or application programming interface (API). It just works with everything.

Java was released to the open source community in November 2006, and the transformation was covered closely by eWEEK. Personally, Java means a great deal to me as a journalist, because in 1995 I became editor of a Sun Microsystems new product-news publication called Sun's Hottest, which was published in 17 languages and sent to partners, customers and resellers globally. In one of those issues, we ran a story about inviting developers to participate in something called a Java applet contest. Naturally, we explained the basics of Java itself.

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