29-11-2017, 09:50 AM
Java is a set of software and specifications developed by Sun Microsystems, which was then acquired by Oracle Corporation, which provides a system to develop application software and deploy it in a multiplatform computing environment. Java is used on a wide variety of computing platforms, from integrated devices and mobile phones to servers and business supercomputers. Java applets, which are less common than stand-alone Java applications, run in secure, sandboxed environments to provide many features of native applications and can be embedded in HTML pages.
Writing in the Java programming language is the main way to produce code that will be implemented as bytecode in a Java virtual machine (JVM); Byte-code compilers are also available for other languages, including Ada, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby. In addition, several languages have been designed to run natively in JVM, including Scala, Clojure and Apache Groovy. Java syntax takes a lot of C and C ++, but object-oriented features are modeled after Smalltalk and Objective-C. Java avoids certain low-level constructs such as pointers and has a very simple memory model where each object is assigned in the heap and all the variables of the object types are references. Memory management is handled through the integrated automatic garbage collection performed by the JVM.
On November 13, 2006, Sun Microsystems made most of its Java implementation available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The latest version is Java 9, the second of the two supported versions (with security updates) from 2017. Oracle (and others) has announced that the use of earlier versions (other than Java 8) of its implementation of JVM presents serious risks, due to unresolved security problems.