Introduction to Java programming

1.1. A small history of Java

Java is a programming language created by James Gosling from Sun Microsystems (Sun) in 1991. The target of Java is to write a program once and then run this program on multiple operating systems. The first publicly available version of Java (Java 1.0) was released in 1995. Sun Microsystems was acquired by the Oracle Corporation in 2010. Oracle has now the steermanship for Java. In 2006 Sun started to make Java available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). 

Java is defined by a specification and consists of a programming language, a compiler, core libraries and a runtime

The Java language was designed with the following properties:

• Platform independent
• Object-orientated programming language
• Strongly-typed programming language
• Interpreted and compiled language
• Automatic memory management

1.2. Hello world Java program

// a small Java program
public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World");
    }
}