Short Introduction to Java

About Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. It has evolved from its humble beginnings to power a large share of today’s digital world, by providing a reliable platform upon which many services and applications are built. New, innovative products and digital services designed for the future continue to rely on Java. These include embedded systems, back-end services, and APIs.

Java is known for its simplicity, robustness, and strong security features.

Technically, Java is highly-structured, class-based, and object-oriented. It is intended to let programmers write once, and run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile.

Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++ but has fewer low-level implementations than either of them e.g. automatic memory management.

Main features

Some of the features that distinguish Java from C/C++ and make it a favorite among developers include:

• Simple & Portable: Java uses automatic memory management. It does this using an automatic garbage collector, therefore you don't have to manage pointers.

• Robust: Due to its memory management system, it can check errors during compile-time and runtime.

• Secured & Dynamic: Designed to execute code from remote sources securely.

• It contains language facilities and libraries for networking.

• Multithreaded: It supports multiple executions of threads (i.e., lightweight processes), including a set of synchronization primitives.

I hope you now begin to appreciate the popularity of Java as a programming language 🤩. Stay tuned as we dive deeper into Java and cover topics such as some of the fundamental concepts of Java programming and OOP 🚀