What is Java

Java is an object-oriented programming language that was developed by James Gosling from Sun Microsystems in 1995. The purpose of developing java is to allow developing interactive applications, general purpose business application and web applications.

• Sun Microsystems released java 1.0 in 1995
• Sun released much of java as Free and open source in November 2006 under the terms of GNU GPL.
• In May 2007 Sun made Java code free and open source.
• In January 27, 2010 Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems. Now Oracle owns both hardware and software products of Sun ( SPARC enterprise and Java)

A few main points about java are:

• Java is a high level programming language
• Java is general purpose programming language
• Java is object oriented language. Java code can be easily extended (an inheritance concept of OOP).
• Learning java is easy if you understand OOP concepts
• Java is platform independent. In simple words programs developed in Java can be deployed / installed in any operating system or device.
• Platform independence is achieved by byte-code. When java programs are compiled, these are compiled into platform independent byte-code. This byte-code runs under Java Virtual machine (JVM).
• Java supports multithreading. That means many tasks can be done simultaneously in Java programs.
• Java based applications are deployed in stock exchanges, banking applications, games and these days in mobile applications as well(Android based applications is an example).

Why Learn Java

Java is one of the most popular language as of today. Java is used in mission critical applications, enterprise level applications and one of the mature platform. Many large corporations use Java for core operations.

As java is one of the mainstream platform, productivity costs is much less than C or C++ and its certifications are also available. Java becomes the choice of many large to small enterprises. So as a programmer it becomes quite worth to learn and getting experienced in Java platform.

Apart from that in today mobile evolving era, programmers can apply learnt skills in Mobile Application development e.g. Android Apps.

So learning Java opens many opportunities as programmer that pays better than other platforms.