Core Java (Evolution of Java)

What is Java ? Java is more than just the programming language itself, that is concurrent, class-based, object-oriented language, "write once, run anywhere" (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM).

Java was developed by James Ghosling, Patrick Naughton, Mike Sheridan at Sun Microsystems Inc. in 1991.It took 18 months to develop the first working version.

The initial name was Oak but it was renamed to Java in 1995 as OAK was a registered trademark of another Tech company.

Evolution of Java:

Java was initially lunched as Java 1.0(JDK 1.0 (23rd Jan, 1996)) but soon after it's release .

Java 1.1(JDK 1.1 (19th Feb, 1997)) was lunch , in this java version 1.1 redefined event handling ,new library elements are added.

Java 1.2(J2SE 1.2 (8th Dec, 1998)) Swing and most important part was added Collection framework and suspend(). resume() and stop method were deprecated from Thread class.

Java 1.3(J2SE 1.3 (8th May, 2000)) no major changes were made but next release that was Java 1.4 (J2SE 1.4 (6th Feb, 2002)) contained several important changes, keyword (assert),chained exception and channel base I/O class has introduced.

Java 1.5(J2SE 5.0 (30th Sep, 2004)) was called J2SE ,it add following major new feature :

- Generics,

- Annotations,

- Autoboxing and autounboxing,

- Enumerations,

- For-each loop,

- Varargs,

- Static import,

- Formatted I/O,

- Concurrency utilities.

In Java SE 7 (28th July, 2011) which included many new changes, like :

- Now String can be used to control Switch statement,

- Multi Catch Exception,

- try-with-resource statement,

- Binary Integer Literals,

And the latest addition to the lot is, Java SE 8, it was released on March 18, 2014.JAVA 8 is a revolutionary release of the world's development platform. It includes a huge upgrade to the Java programming model and coordinated evolution JVM and libraries.

The following features for Java 8 Programming:

              1. Lambda Expressions and Functional Interfaces,

              2. Java Stream API(java.util.stream) for Bulk Data Operations on Collections,

              3. default and static methods in Interfaces,

              4. forEach() method in Iterable interface,

              5. Java Time API,

                   6. Collection API improvements,

              7. Concurrency API improvements,

              8. Java IO improvements,

              9. Nashorn JavaScript Engine,

              10.Parallel Array Sorting,

              11.Type and Repating Annotations,

              12 JDBC Enhancements etc.