Java

In the early 1990s, the Californian company Sun Microsystems — specialised in UNIX servers and workstations — sought to anticipate the arrival of embedded computing in consumer electronic devices such as set-top boxes, personal digital assistants and interactive televisions. A small group called the Green Team, led by James Gosling and including Mike Sheridan and Patrick Naughton, began in 1991 to design a language initially named Oak, after the oak tree growing outside Gosling's office. The aim was a portable, safe, object-oriented language suited to devices with limited resources. The project struggled to find a market until the team realised in 1994 that the rapidly growing Web — Mosaic had been released in 1993 — was the ideal platform for a cross-platform language. Renamed Java in January 1995 for trademark reasons, the language was officially unveiled on 23 May 1995 at the SunWorld conference. Its strength lay in the Java virtual machine (JVM), which executed an intermediate bytecode, making the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" slogan operational on any machine running a JVM. The language adopted a syntax close to C++ but removed manual pointers, introduced a garbage collector, native multithreading support and a sandbox security model. Netscape Navigator 2.0 embedded a Java applet interpreter in the browser as early as the autumn of 1995, giving the language immediate visibility. In 1996 Sun released the Java Development Kit 1.0. Java became within a few years the main development platform for server-side enterprise applications, thanks to the Java EE specification (J2EE in 1999), the ecosystem of application servers (WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss) and the Spring framework from 2003. It also equipped billions of mobile phones via Java ME, and from 2008 onwards Android applications, whose Dalvik — later ART — virtual machine executes a derivative of Java bytecode. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. Thirty years after its release, Java remains one of the most widely used languages in the world, alongside Python and JavaScript.