The Basics of Java
History
- The first object oriented programming language was Simula-67
- designed to allow programmers to write simulation programs
- In the early 1980’s, Smalltalk was developed at Xerox PARC
- New syntax, large open-source library of reusable code, bytecode, platform independence, garbage collection.
- late 1980’s, C++ was developed by B. Stroustrup,
- Recognized the advantages of OO but also recognized that there were tremendous numbers of C programmers
- In 1991, engineers at Sun Microsystems started a project to design a language that could be used in consumer ‘smart devices’: Oak
- When the Internet gained popularity, Sun saw an opportunity to exploit the technology.
- The new language, renamed Java, was formally presented in 1995 at the SunWorld ’95 conference.