Java

Why Java?

Java is a high level and object oriented programming language. Java programming language was developed originally by James Gosling at Sun Microsytems in 1995. Today, Java is the foundation of almost every type of application globally like, video games, mobile and web applications, enterprise software, networked applications. Java is a robust and secure language as it has following few advantages -

• Object Oriented - My previous post explains what is an Object Oriented Programming. In Java, everything is an object. Java is class based, classes contain data (variables) and member methods / functions or procedures. Objects are the instances of classes. Java provides a library of built-in / ready-made classes and a developer can create their own custom classes and can reuse readily available classes through Java library.
• Platform independent - Java runs almost on every hardware platform, as java programs are compiled into byte code and are run on Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JVM is an engine that provides runtime environment to run java code. It converts Java byte code into machine language.
• Architecture neutral and portable - Java doesn't depend on any platform or architecture how the information is stored, so it's implementation is easy and can be run its programs on any platform using JVM (Java Virtual Machine). 
• Interpreted - Java compiler compiles the java source program and generates the platform-independent byte code, and JVM interprets the byte code into computer instructions for any machine.
• High Performance - Java enables high performance with use of JIT (Just In Time) compiler. JIT compiler is a program on JVM, which is used to interpret byte code into computer instructions.
• Distributed - Java works on all kind of networks including internet.

Java is much more than I mentioned in above points. But as the beginner, we can learn gradually how Java is so much robust and powerful language, and is used in mostly all areas.

NOTE: Java is vast language and supports several features. I don't want to overwhelm the beginners who just started to learn. I will cover all the concepts in coming posts one by one.

Sun Microsystems - SUN (Stanford University Network) Microsystems was founded on 24 Feb, 1982 by Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim and Bill Joy. The company was acquired by Oracle in 2010.

Byte code - Java programs are compiled into the byte code, which is not dependent on the machine / hardware-platform. Same byte code can be run on any hardware platform (MacOS, Windows, Unix, Linux etc.) using its software-platform JVM (Java Virtual Machine).

JVM (Java Virtual Machine) - JVM is a software platform specific for each hardware platform, converts the byte code into the machine dependent instructions.

JIT (Just In Time) compiler - JIT compiler is a feature of JVM (Java Virtual Machine), when it compiles the methods using dynamic runtime information in the runtime environment.