Tuesday December 05, 2006
Trails of Java
Most of breakthroughs depend on setbacks/failures
Java was designed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s as a programming tool in a small project (known as "Green Project") initiated by Patrick Naughton, Mike Sheridan, and James Gosling. Green Project’s Team was comprised of just 13 people. Green Team locked them away in an anonymous office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park for 18 months to come up with a working demo. In the summer of 1992, they emerged with an interactive, handheld home-entertainment device controller with an animated touchscreen user interface.
This is when our very own little cartoon character Duke (Java technology mascot), was born and was shown waving and doing cartwheels on the screen.
Gosling called the new language "Oak", after the tree outside his window. As the project gained momentum and started involving potential customers in the cable television industry, project was renamed as "FirstPerson". There was some amount of hesitation in cable companies to accept FirstPerson and thus FirstPerson had to struggle for its target market. Eventually team decided to hit Internet market with "Java". Internet and Java were a match made in heaven and since then there has been no looking back.
Around March 1995, there were only seven or eight binary copies of what they called "jdk 1.0a" outside of Sun. Then team decided to post a "full public" alpha version ("1.0a2") of the Java source code on the Internet. Sometime around mid of 90’s Java source code was pushed to the outside world through net. In few months, the download count reached thousands.
Java Saga
JDK 1.0 (January 23, 1996)- 211 classes in 8 packages
JDK 1.1 (February 19, 1997) - 503 classes in 23 packages
J2SE 1.2 (December 8, 1998) Codename - Playground - 1,520 classes in 59 packages
J2SE 1.3 (May 8, 2000) Codename - Kestrel - HotSpot JVM included
J2SE 1.4 (February 6, 2002) Codename - Merlin - First java release developed under JCP
J2SE 5.0 (September 30, 2004) Codename - Tiger - Introduced significant new language features
J2SE 6.0 Codename - Mustang - JDK 6 Beta is out
J2SE 7.0 Codename - Dolphin - Has HotSpot,javac & JavaHelp as open source components.
Since J2SE 1.4, the evolution of the Java Language has been governed by the Java Community Process (JCP), which uses Java Specification Requests (JSRs) to propose and specify additions and changes to the Java platform.
Mustang and Dolphin, we'll miss you
Sun is retiring some of its dearest-old friends. In order to develop a new project naming system around our open source model, Sun has decided to drop code. So with some sadness, Mustang has been walked out from her stable one last time to let her roam free in the meadows and gates have been opened for Dolphin to return to the sea.
Mustang on java.net is now available as JDK 6.
Our new project can be found at JDK 7.
This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
