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Java was developed at Sun Microsystems, one of the giants in the computer industry. Its revenues approached $6 billion in 1995 and have been growing at a rate of 15 to 20 percent in recent years.
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Java was developed at Sun Microsystems, one of the giants in the computer industry. Its revenues approached $6 billion in 1995 and have been growing at a rate of 15 to 20 percent in recent years. These figures are strong indicators that Sun understands the demands of its market and is developing and providing products which accurately match them. Java may prove to be further proof of Sun's corporate acumen.
Originally known as Oak, a name later changed to avoid trademark conflicts, Java has been under development since 1991. Sun originally intended to use Oak to develop software that would control consumer-electronics products. Built in anticipation of a future demand for such a system, Oak was conceived as an elegant, clean language with strong
Object-Oriented features and an ability to provide seamless operation on multiple platforms. Oak was developed so quickly that it was ready long before its target market of sophisticated remote controls and Personal Digital Assistants
(PDAs) existed.
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Sun found itself with a solution in need of a problem, a predicament that did not take long to resolve. Because Oak, by now renamed Java, required a minimum of implementation effort on each new platform, it represented an ideal solution to many of the problems encountered when developing software that would work in an environment of increasingly heterogeneous networks. The rapid growth of the Internet, and the World Wide Web in particular, demanded a new type of technology, one that would address such important issues as platform independence and security, objectives Java was already designed to achieve.
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With these issues in mind, the Java team produced a Web browser initially called Web Runner. This program later became the HotJava browser, Sun's showcase Java product and the first truly useful application based on the Java technology.
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Sun announced Java and HotJava at the SunWorld conference in San Francisco in May
1995 and Netscape Communications announced at the same conference that its Navigator browser would support Java from late 1995 on. Almost at once many big names in the industry announced intentions to license the Java product and provide Java implementations and tools, thereby endorsing both the language and Sun's vision of the future.
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