If Java were not a geek intervention, it could well have stood for coffee, or even a primeval Indonesian island. But as the recent punchline of James Gosling an advert cackles, ‘a lot can happen over coffee’. Well, the Bay Area geeks seem to know their beans and love them too.
So it came as no surprise when San Franciscan James Gosling took off his gloves to unveil the Java programming language in 1991. The 53-year-old VP & Sun Fellow at Sun Microsystems is credited to be the father of Java, a programming language expressly designed for use in the distributed Internet environment. Today, the language rules the world of code jocks as the very platform that supports other “specialised” computer languages.
But first, smell the coffee. Java. To begin with, such aromatic nomenclature was definitely not on the cards. Gosling had initially coined the term ‘oak’ for the programme after the mighty oak that he could see outside his work window. But that ran into trademark issues and so random names were thrown up. “Java slipped in because it was slang for coffee and everybody loved coffee,” says Gosling, whose team went through a dozen names before selecting Java at lucky number five. “My personal favourite was ‘lyric’ at number four but even that didn’t pass muster.”
Anyhow, what’s in a name. The idea was not born in a day — it arrived in a context, when Gosling was working on a project at Sun, researching on the rumblings outside the computer industry.
“Cellphones were getting started, car electronics were getting sophisticated, automation was happening,” he says. In the early 1990s, people were reinventing computer science. “I kept meeting people who were doing things and kept failing at them but on the other hand, there was a different attitude about scale and consumer interface.” That’s when a bunch of electronics engineers at Sun decided to embark on an academic exercise with the Green Project. The idea was quite simple: to build some consumer electronics prototype around software development methodologies. “That happened to be where the world was really headed, which was a piece of luck,” says Gosling.
Now there may be about a dozen things that Java did very differently from previous computer languages. For instance, it adopted a different attitude to work by providing a set of tools “that enabled people build consumer-friendly tools”. Earlier, computers tended to be things tucked away in back-offices. Around the same time, networking became the buzzword as systems started getting connected. “Java was best suited for an interconnected environment,” says Gosling.
That said, integration has always been the key driver for the language to thrive. In 1997, Sun approached a couple of standards bodies to formalise Java, but soon withdrew from the process. “It was because the standards process was being manipulated by Microsoft. There were shady backroom deals that people were engaging in and it became a very difficult situation,” recalls Gosling.
In May 2007, Sun made Java’s core code free and open source. Knowing Gosling, that was expected. “Open source makes things dramatically more secure than the standard model,” he says, claiming security issues crop up due to a failure of the imagination of those who write programmes. “In open source, people actually scrutinise the content and software engineers stare at interesting stuff. Today, almost every transaction in banks is done over Java because of its record for security.”
The programme is Gospel for those using connected networks. It is changing the way police departments relate to each other and the working of the Brazilian National Healthcare System, which provides healthcare in the Amazon Basin using programmes written in Java. For a host of governments, Java is increasingly coming in handy for tax accounting. The programme also dishes out applications for cellphones. When asked whether IT departments nowadays are still on an R&D binge, Gosling reveals that they’re doing much more with the same resources. That’s a complete U-turn from when he started out in IT with a burning ambition to just develop software, irrespective of the costs.
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