I started learning how to code in Java this year. It is like I arrived very late to the party. I just hope the party is not over. Now it is not like I never heard about Java over the years. I just did not get into it until now.I read a humorous post that reflected back on Java from the beginnings. There is a lot to the history. However I found many of the milestones were events that I heard about.
Java actually started out as the Oak programming language. The name was switched to Java. The Java 1 developer's conference had a mighty turn out. Version 1.1 of the JDK had JDBC for database connectivity.
Java 2.0 came out. Then there was Enterprise Java beans. I recall the C++ programmers on my project getting excited about EJBs when they first came out. Then the excitement died down. To tell the truth, I don't really know much about EJBs. I assume they are a way to store data you get from the DB.
Web services got hot in the Java world. I also recall the craze where every team on my project wanted to publish some web services. That was short lived though. I saw a metric that 75% of developers used Java back in 2003. I wonder if the number still hold true.
Another metric I spied was that 4.5M developers use Java today. That's a heck of a lot of people. What is the future of Java? I read an article every now and then about problems with Java 7. Time to get familiar with the new Java landscape. Perhaps this party has really only just begun.
