What began as an experiment in consumer electronics in the early 1990s celebrates its 20th anniversary as a staple of enterprise computing this week. Java has become a dominant platform, able to run wherever the Java Virtual Machine is supported, forging ahead despite the rise of rival languages and recent tribulations with security.
Java’s road to dominance hinged on a pivot of sorts. The language debuted as an object-oriented programming tool in 1995, emerging from five years of work by Sun Microsystems’ Green Team, which included James Gosling and Mike Sheridan, among others. The team was looking to merge information and programming to make Web-surfing more dynamic and to target the convergence of digital consumer devices and computers, both client-side concerns. As such, Java, which was originally known as “Oak,” first gained prominence for its client-side applet technology, but later found its long-term groove in evolving toward the server side, thanks to the business aims of its closest supporters Sun, IBM, and Oracle, analyst Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester Research, recalls.
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