The Java language has revolutionized the way we program applications for the Internet. Two great ideas make this language so promising:
• Applications written using Java run on multiple different platforms.
• Automatic memory management or garbage collection (GC) comes as a great relief for developers.
Other than these two issues, most of the remaining Java features can be implemented using the majority of other languages. Since its first public release in 1995, the Java language has been maturing and consolidating its position in the market as an increasing number of organizations realize its built-in strengths.

In the beginning, there were efforts to dilute Java’s increasing popularity and to prove it to be just like any other language. Various sources attempted to prove that Java applications don’t perform alike on all platforms, especially with respect to speed. But Java stood the test of time and emerged even stronger. Ironically, Microsoft stood isolated, even after having produced the world’s fastest and best Java compiler and JVM implementation. (Microsoft’s Java compiler can compile 10,000 lines of code per second.) Much of the Java API competes directly with Microsoft’s API: JDBC with ODBC, JTAPI with TAPI, JDO with ADO, JSP with ASP, Bean with COM, and so on.

Though Java has had huge success, it has also left some problems unattended. Sun initially stated that with Java, “write once run anywhere” is possible; after introducing J2EE, however, Sun admitted that the “one size fits all” plan doesn’t work. Java also failed to capture the desktop application market. When developing OS-specific applications, Java was not chosen over other languages (on Windows, VB and VC++; on UNIX, C, C++, and so on) because many developers consider performance to be a key issue; compilers specific to an operating system would run much faster than the Java compiler. Further, the way in which Java is implemented by different vendors is not uniform across the industry.

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