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Part VII
Java

12  What Is Java?
13  Working with Java
14  Programming in Java

Chapter 12
What Is Java?1


1This chapter is reprinted with permission from Gosling, J., B. Joy, and G. Steele. 1996. The Java Language Specification. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

by James Gosling, Bill Joy, and Guy Steele

Java was originally called Oak and designed for use in embedded consumer-electronic applications by James Gosling. After several years of experience with the language, and significant contributions by Ed Frank, Patrick Naughton, Jonathan Payne, and Chris Warth, it was retargeted to the Internet, renamed Java, and substantially revised to be the language specified here. The final form of the language was defined by James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steele, Richard Tuck, Frank Yellin, and Arthur van Hoff, with help from Graham Hamilton, Tim Lindholm, and many other friends and colleagues.

Java is a general-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented programming language, specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. Java allows application developers to write a program once and then be able to run it everywhere on the Internet.

We believe that Java is a mature language, ready for widespread use. Nevertheless, we expect some evolution of the language in the years to come. We intend to manage this evolution in a way that is completely compatible with existing applications. To do this, we intend to make relatively few new versions of the language and to distinguish each new version with a different filename extension. Java compilers and systems will be able to support the several versions simultaneously, with complete compatibility.

Much research and experimentation with Java is already underway. We encourage this work and will continue to cooperate with external groups to explore improvements to Java. For example, we have already received several interesting proposals for parameterized types. In technically difficult areas, near the state of the art, this kind of research collaboration is essential.


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