Java

Geography

Java contains the capital, Jakarta. The cultural center of the island is the city of Yogyakarta.

It is located in a chain with Sumatra to the northwest and Bali to the east. To the northeast is Borneo. To the south is Christmas Island.

Java is almost entirely of volcanic origin, and contains no less than thirty-eight mountains of that conical form which indicates their having at one time or other been active volcanoes. See Volcanoes of Java.

• Javanese language, spoken in central and eastern Java
• Basa Sunda is the language of about 27,000,000 people from the western third of Java.

History

The Stealth Project was soon renamed to the Green Project with James Gosling and Mike Sheridan joining Patrick Naughton. They, together with some other engineers, began work in a small office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to develop a new technology. The team originally considered C++ as the language to use, but many of them as well as Bill Joy found C++ and the available APIs problematic for several reasons.

Their platform was an embedded platform and had limited resources. Many members found that C++ was too complicated and developers often misused it. They found C++'s lack of garbage collection to also be a problem. Security, distributed programming, and threadinging support was also required. Finally, they wanted a platform that could be easily ported to all types of devices.

According to the available accounts, Bill Joy had ideas of a new language combining the best of MESA and C. He proposed, in a paper called Further, to Sun that its engineers should produce an object-oriented environment based on C++. James Gosling's frustrations with C++ began while working on Imagination, an SGML editor. Initially, James attempted to modify and extend C++, which he referred to as C++ ++ --, but soon abandoned that in favor of creating an entirely new language, called Oak named after the oak tree that stood just outside his office.

Like many stealth projects working on new technology, the team worked long hours and by the summer of 1992, they were able to demo portions of the new platform including the Green OS, Oak the language, the libraries, and the hardware. Their first attempt focused on building a PDA-like device having a highly graphical interface and a smart agent called Duke to assist the user.

The device was named Star7 after a telephone feature activated by *7 on a telephone keypad. The feature enabled users to answer the telephone anywhere. The PDA device itself was demonstrated on September 3, 1992.

In November of that year, the Green Project was spun off to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Microsystems: FirstPerson, Inc. The team relocated to Palo Alto. The FirstPerson team was interested in building highly interactive devices and when Time Warner issued an RFP for a set-top box, FirstPerson changed their target and responded with a proposal for a set-top box platform. However, the cable industry felt that their platform gave too much control to the user and FirstPerson lost their bid to SGI. An additional deal with 3DO for a set-top box also failed to materialize. FirstPerson was unable to generate any interest within the cable TV industry for their platform. Following their failures, the company, FirstPerson, was rolled back into Sun.

It was also in 1994, that Oak was renamed Java. An IP (intellectual property) search revealved that Oak had already been trademarked for another language so the team searched for a new name. The name Java was coined at a local coffee shop frequented by some of the members. It is not clear whether the name is an acronymn or not. Most likely, it is not, however some accounts claim that it stands for the names of James Gosling, Arthur Van Hoff, and Andy Bechtolsheim.

In October of 1994, HotJava and the Java platform was demoed for Sun executives. Java 1.0a was made available for download in 1994, but the first public release of Java and the HotJava web browser came on May 23, 1995, at the SunWorld conference. The annoucement was made by John Gage, the Director of Science for Sun Microsystems. His announcement was accompanied by a surprise announcement by Marc Andreessen, Executive Vice President of Netscape, that Netscape would be including Java support in its browsers.

In January of 1996, the JavaSoft business group was formed by Sun Microsystems to develop the technology.

• GCJ, a Java compiler that comes as part of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection
• GNU Classpath, GNU's replacement for Sun's proprietary class libraries
• The Jakarta Project produces free software in Java, especially tools for building web applications
• kaffe, a clean room implementation of the Java virtual machine with associated class libraries
• SableVM, (LGPLed) Java Virtual Machine meant to be robust, efficient and portable

See also

• Comparison of Java to C++
• Java XML
• Java Servlet
• Java humor
• Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition
• Javapedia

External links

There were four primary goals in the creation of the Java language:

• It is object-oriented.
• It is independent of the host platform (more or less)
• It contains language facilities and libraries for networking.
• It is designed to execute code from remote sources securely.

Object orientation

The first characteristic, object orientation ("OO"), refers to a method of programming and language design. The main idea of OO is to design software around the "things" (ie. objects) it manipulates, rather than the actions it performs. This is based on the notion that the former change less frequently and radically than the latter, making such objects (actually the entities containing data) the more stable foundation for a software system's design. The intent is to make large software projects easier to manage, thus improving quality and reducing the number of failed projects.

Control structures

do {
    statement(s)
} while (Boolean expression);

for (initialisation ; termination condition ; incrementing expr) {
    statement(s)
}

Conditional statements

if (Boolean expression) {
    statement(s)
}

if (Boolean expression) {
    statement(s)
} else {
    statement(s)
}

if (Boolean expression) {
    statement(s)
} else if (Boolean expression) {
    statement(s)
} else if (Boolean expression) {
    statement(s)
} else {
    statement(s)
}

switch (integer expression) {
    case constant integer expr:
         statement(s)
         break;
    ...
    default:
         statement(s)
         break;
}

Exception handling

try {
    statement(s)
} catch (exception type) {
    statement(s)
} catch (exception type) {
    statement(s)
} finally {
    statement(s)
}

Unstructured control flow

Java does not have goto statements, as their use is widely considered poor programming practice. There are, however, some uses for goto that are considered acceptable, and Java have facilities to duplicate such functionality.

break;

Java's break and continue statements are more powerful than the C and C++ constructs of the same name, in that they are capable of exiting more than one loop-nesting level. Specifically, to jump out of a particular loop, one can label the loop, and then affix the label to the break or continue statement. To achieve similar functionality in C and C++ would require the use of a goto statement.

For instance:

outer: while (true) {
    inner: while (true) {
        break;             // Exits the innermost loop
        break inner;       // Also exits the innermost loop
        break outer;       // Exits the outermost loop
    }
}

break label;

continue label;

With

return aValue;

The language as such has been stable since JDK 1.0; the class libraries that come with the JDK got larger and have changed in some parts. Extensionss and architectures closely tied to the Java programming language include:

• J2EE
• J2ME
• JNDI
• JSML
• JDBC
• JAIN
• JDMK
• Jini
• Jiro
• JXTA
• JavaSpaces
• JMI

• Generics - Provides compile-time type safety for collections and eliminates the drudgery of casting.
• Autoboxing/unboxing - Eliminates the drudgery of manual conversion between primitive types (such as int) and wrapper types (such as Integer).
• Metadata - Lets you avoid writing boilerplate code, by enabling tools to generate it from annotations in the source code. This leads to a "declarative" programming style where the programmer says what should be done and tools emit the code to do it.

Interpreted version

There is an interpreted version of Java called beanshell which may be used as a shell scripting language. The interpreter may be embedded in a Java application to make it scriptable.

External links

Geography

Demographics

Geography

Demographics