Java
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The Green Team
Sun recruited Gosling and five others to create a
secret project, code named the Green Team, whose mission was to
build technology that could unify electronic devices. The collective vision of the Green Team was
to create a single operating environment that could be used by any device,
no matter which platform it used. The
core features they wanted included interactivity
between devices, a decrease in their development time and a cost reduction
of implementing new features through the use of a single
operating environment. This would eliminate the need to program for
different platforms and allow Sun to expand into the lucrative video game
and domestic device markets.
The project was so isolated that the team moved away from Sun, severed
all regular communication, and vowed to only emerge when the project was
complete. After 18 months of high-level work, in which the team worked
around the clock, they finally came out of hiding. With millions of
dollars spent, and hundreds of man-hours consumed, Goslings team
presented Sun with a small device that fit in the palm of their CEOs
hand.
Oak
On a small touch-screen interface the future mascot of Java waved and
cart-wheeled for its audience. "Duke" was a software entity that could do
all the tasks on behalf of the user and represented technology that was
ready to perform jobs in a wide range of entertainment platforms and
appliances.
The brilliance behind the new technology was not the wide range of
functionality the hand-held tool could undertake, but the new programming
language
specifically created for the device. As the lead engineer and key
architect of the new language, James Gosling understood that the key
features of Oak needed to incorporate three broad ideas
Platform independence. Goslings solution to the multiple platform
problem was to incorporate a virtual machine into the architecture of the
new language. The virtual machine would translate the programmers code
into the language of whatever machine it was being run on.
Extreme reliability. Programs are only as good as the programmers
developing the code. Gosling understood that in popular programming
languages of the time, some features unnecessarily added to their
complexity. His solution was to remove or hide these elements.
Security. The new language was conceptually designed for network use,
where information and code could be shared. Systems on such a network
would be vulnerable to malicious code. Each element of the language was
thus designed with security in mind.
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