Java

Java is an object-oriented and general-purpose programming language built to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It was designed to let application developers write once, run anywhere (WORA), allowing the Java code to run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation.

A bit of Java history

Java was developed by Sun Microsystems, created by James Gosling, and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems – Java Platforms. Patrick Newton (head of a group of engineers) and James Gosling worked on the Green project to develop a language for programming electronic devices like cable TV switch boxes. They wanted the new code to work on any machine. For these purposes, they couldn’t use the C ++ programming language, so they developed a new programming language initially called Oak. In 1995, Sun Microsystems decided to announce a new product, renaming it Java (from Java coffee). In 2009, Oracle became the owner of Java.

What’s unique about Java?

Java is much more than a language. Java’s ecosystem is huge, as it provides an endless number of frameworks, tools, and libraries for almost any task. In addition to possessing the qualities of many successful object-programming languages developed over the past few decades, Java has managed to reach the middle ground. The Java object model is simple and easily extensible. At the same time, elementary data types such as integers are stored as high-performance non-object components. 

The most famous solutions developed with Java

According to Oracle, Java programs run on 3 billion devices. Java is widely used and is one of the most popular languages. This language has strong positions in industrial programming and is widely used by such enterprises as:

1. NASA World Wind is a powerful geographic information system. They use Java to create a program to select the scale, direction, and viewing angles and search by geographical names. 
2. LinkedIn is one of the largest social networks for creating business contacts. Java is one of the main languages of the server-side of the platform. It mainly used for logging functionality, messaging, recognizing, and converting links in texts. LinkedIn also uses Java for its mobile app for the Android OS. 
3. Amazon is a well-known substantial online e-commerce platform and recognized as one of the world’s largest technology companies. Amazon uses Java for its web services (AWS). They also write automation scripts in Java because of their excellent support.
4. Minecraft is a world-famous sandbox computer game that is written in Java. In the game, Java is used mainly for building game logic, rendering, and messaging.

Java pros and cons

Advantages of Java:

• It permits developers to create standard programs and reusable code.
• Java code works on any machine and doesn’t need any special software installed, but JVM needs to be present on the device.
• Distributed computing helps in developing applications on networks that can contribute to both data and application functionality.
• Learning and introduction to the Java programming language remain simple.
• Java has no explicit pointer. It has to be a security manager who defines the access of classes.
• Because Java is designed to run in a distributed environment, security is becoming an extremely important issue.
• The memory is divided into two parts where one is a heap, and another is a stack. Whenever we declare a variable, JVM gives memory from either stack or heap space. It helps to keep the information and restore it quickly.
• It allows the program to perform many tasks at the same time.

Disadvantages of Java:

• It is memory-consuming, and sometimes it works slower than natively compiled languages such as C++.
• The default look of GUI applications built in Java using the Swing toolkit may differ from native applications.
• The memory is managed through garbage collection. When the garbage collector runs, it can affect the application’s performance, so the developers must stop other threads from allowing the garbage collector thread to work.

Why UppLabs chose Java? 

There are five primary peculiarities of the Java language that make it a perfect choice for our projects:

1. It is simple, object-oriented, and familiar.
2. It is robust and secure.
3. It is architecture-neutral and portable.
4. It executes with high performance.
5. It is interpreted, threaded, and dynamic.
6. There are 3 billion devices run on Java.