Introduced commercially by Sun Microsystems in 1995, the Java programming
language will be a teenager in 2008. Java has seen tremendous growth in its
13 years. Its design, ease-of-use, and most importantly its portability has
made Java the fastest-growing programming language in computing history.
Java.com says that Java today powers more than 4.5 billion devices worldwide.
From the beginning, Java was designed to be portable. Applications written in
Java compile to the freely available Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the
resulting application can run on any system that implements the JVM. This
ability to run the same application on many hardware platforms has resulted
in Java's increased popularity for Internet, gaming applications and devices
like mobile phones and sma... (more)