History

The begginings

James Gosling, Mike Sheridan and Patrick Naughton created Java in June of 1991. They've designed Java for interactive television, but it was too advanced for cable television industry back in the day. It wasn't even named Java. Initially they've called it Oak, after the tree that stood outside Gosling's office. Then it was renamed to Green and then finally renamed to Java from Java coffee.

It's syntax was designed by Gosling with C/C++ style to give system and application programmers more familiar feeling.

First public implementation was released by Sun Microsystems in 1996 as Java 1.0. It promised Write Once, Run Anywhere. Soon, major web browserws implemented the ability of running Java applets with the web pages and that's how Java became popular so fast.

Back in the day, Java applets were a huge deal. They were small applications that compiled to Java bytecode. It was launched from a webpage and then it was executed with JVM in a process separated from the browser.

Java 2, released initially as J2SE 1.2 in Deecember 1998-1999, Java language had multiple configurations built for different types of enviroments. It included APIs and technologies for enterprise apps typically run in server enviroments, while it featured APIs optimized for mobile apps. In 2006, because of marketing purposes, Sun Microsystems renamed new J2 versions as Java EE (Enterprise Edition), Java ME (Micro Edition) and Java SE (Standard Edition).

Making Java open-source

Process started in the fall of 2006. Most of the JVM was released as free and open-source under the GNU General Public License. On May 8, 2007, process was finished, Sun made all of its JVM core code under free software and open-source software distribution terms, except for small pieces of code to which Sun didn't hold the copyright.

After acquisition

After acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corp. in 2009-2010, Oracle described itself as steward of Java technology with a relentless commitment to fostering a community of transparency and participation. This didn't prevent Oracle from filing a lawsuit against Google shortly after that for using Java inside Android SDK. On April 2, 2010, Gosling resigned from Oracle.

Now, Java software runs on everything from laptops to game consoles, data centers to supercomputers.