History of Java Technology

History of Java programming language is usually associated with origin predates of the web.

     James Gosling, Patrick Naughton, Chris Warth, Mike Sheridan and Ed Frank initiated the Java language project in June 1991. The idea was to develop a language which was platform-independent and which could create embedded softwares for consumer electronic devices. The language took 18 months to develop and had an initial name as Oak which was renamed to Javain 1995, due to copyright issues. Originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems(which has since merge into Oracle Corporation) and released in 1995. JDK 1.0 released in(January 23, 1996).

Java SE 8.0 is a current stable release of Java, and many other previous Java versions are also available.

Java Version Release History

Version	Released on	Description
JDK1.0	23 Jan 1996	The codename is Oak. Initial release of Jdk1.0
JDK1.1	19 Feb 1997	The addition of AWT, JDBC, RMI, Javabeans etc
J2SE 1.2	8 Dec 1998	J2SE(Java2 Standard Edition), Codename Playground, Major additions are- Swing graphical API was integrated, strictfp Keyword, reflection, Java IDL, collection and JIT Compiler in Sun’s JVM for Java plug-in was equipped.
J2SE 1.3	8 May 2000	Codename Kestrel. The major changes are- Hotspot JVM included, RMI modified to support compatibility with CORBA, Java Naming and Directory Interface(JNDI) included and Java Platform Debugger Architecture(JPDA),Java Sound etc.
J2SE 1.4	6 Feb 2002	Codename merlin. This was the first release of the Java platform developed under Java community process as JSR 59. The Major Changes are- assert Keyword, Regular Expression, Exception chaining, Image I/O API for reading and writing images, Java Web start included.
J2SE 5.0	30 Sept 2004	codename Tiger , Originally Numbered 1.5, New language features added are- Generics, Metadata, Autoboxing, Enumeratations, Swing, Var args, collections static imports etc.
Java SE 6	11 Dec 2006	Codename Mustang. New changes are- Scripting Language support, Improved web service support trough JAX-WS , JDBC 4.0 support, support for pluggable annotations, JVM improvements including Synchronization and compiler performance optimizations, Garbaze collection algorithms.
Java SE 7.0	28 July 2011	Codename Dolphin, currently in development stage, The features changes are- JVM support for dynamic language, New library for parallel computing on multi core, compressed 64 bit pointers, Automatic resource management.
Java SE 8.0	18 March 2014

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