Java at 20

With Java hitting its 20th anniversary this week, so IT media is actively writing on Celebrating 20 years of juicy Java. Oracle is celebrating 20 years of Java, which was officially announced at the SunWorld conference in San Francisco on May 23 1995. The origins of Java go back earlier, Sun’s secret “Green Project” where Gosling created a language called Oak, a processor-independent language for controlling entertainment devices (1992). The entertainment device idea did not take off but the team adapted the language. Java took off rapidly. Sun released Java as open source in 2006. To get to know more details of history of Java, take a look at Java timeline.

Java made its public debut twenty years ago today, and despite a sometimes bumpy history that features its parent company being absorbed by Oracle, it’s still widely used. Java still routinely tops, or is near the top of, surveys of the most widely used programming languages. Oracle estimates that the language is used by over 9 million developers and powers more than 7 billion devices.

In Java at 20: How it changed programming forever article Elliotte Rusty Harold discusses how the language changed the art and business of programming, turning on a generation of coders.  Java’s core strength was that it was built to be a practical tool for getting work done. It popularized good ideas from earlier languages by repackaging them in a format that was familiar to the average C coder, though (unlike C++ and Objective-C) Java was not a strict superset of C. Java programs could be run on many different platforms due the fact that Java programs run using Java Virtual Machine.

Java’s key to success is simplicity. Java’s success in remaining relevant on the ever-changing landscape of software development has been its relative simplicity: “The core values of the language, and the platform, are readability and simplicity”- it’s easy for humans to understand it at a glance. Readability is a particularly valuable trait for a programming language in applications where programmers must be able to understand code that may have been written months, or even years earlier.

Java was once a hot web browser add-on technology (remember Java applets). As it turned out, Java did not flourish for long as a browser plug-in, but found huge take up elsewhere. Originally intended as a cross-platform client library, Java found real success in the server space: Its cross-platform ability made it ideal for IT vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Sun itself. It was an obvious choice for enterprise middleware and application servers. Android aside, can Java recover its mojo beyond enterprise server applications?

At the other end of the scale, Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) was widely used for apps on mobile phones. But not hat much nowadays. Google chose Java as the primary app development language for Android, it developed its own runtime, called Dalvik, rather than implementing the official Java specification. On mobile phones, Java was pushed aside by Apple, which uses Objective C and Swift for iOS apps.

Java was initially made for embedded applications. Once there were Java processors and tiny embedded plaforms running Java gaining once interest that has faded over years for many reasons (one was that Java was once free on your PC but costed real money on embedded applications). Smart cards that run Java have been sold 10 billion units. It remains to be seen what position Java can enjoy in Internet of Things.

Media/entertanment sectors also liked Java. Java is part of the standard for Blu-Ray discs. Pretty much failed digital television multimedia system Multimedia Home Platform was Java based. Java was very hot during Dot-com bubble.

Java, once installed very many PCs, is also losing on desktop applications. Java is no longer much used for desktop apps, where its constant security updates, and Oracle’s habit of bundling unrelated software with the runtime download, have made it an annoyance. At one time Java security was considered to bad that security people (including me) even recommended to get rid of Java immediately – unless you absolutely need it (and even then think twice).

Twenty years since its inception, Java is no longer the scrappy upstart. It has become the entrenched incumbent other languages rebel against. Languages like Ruby, Python and JavaScript have made significant inroads into Java’s territory. There are many new programming languages, and even some of them run on Java Virtual Machine.