An object-oriented language originally developed at Sun by
James Gosling (and known by the name "Oak") with the intention of
being the successor to C++ (the project
was however originally sold to Sun as an embedded language for
use in set-top boxes). After the great Internet explosion of
1993-1994, Java was hacked into a byte-interpreted language and
became the focus of a relentless hype campaign by Sun, which
touted it as the new language of choice for distributed
applications.
Java is indeed a stronger and cleaner design than C++ and has
been embraced by many in the hacker community - but it has been a
considerable source of frustration to many others, for reasons
ranging from uneven support on different Web browser platforms,
performance issues, and some notorious deficiencies of some of
the standard toolkits (AWT in particular). Microsoft's determined attempts to corrupt
the language (which it rightly sees as a threat to its OS
monopoly) have not helped. As of 1999, these issues are still in
the process of being resolved.
Despite many attractive features and a good design, it is
difficult to find people willing to praise Java who have tried to
implement a complex, real-world system with it (but to be fair it
is early days yet, and no other language has ever been forced to
spend its childhood under the limelight the way Java has). On the
other hand, Java has already been a big win in academic circles, where it has taken the
place of Pascal as the preferred
tool for teaching the basics of good programming to the next
generation of hackers.