Programming Tutorials

The java Buzzwords

By: aathishankaran in Java Tutorials on 2007-02-01  

No discussion of the genesis of java is complete without a look at the java buzzwords. Although the fundamental forces that necessitated the invention of java are portability and security, other factors also played an important role in molding the final form of the language, the key considerations were summed up by the java team in the following list of buzzwords:

• Simple
• Secure
• Portable
• Object-oriented
• Robust
• Multithreaded
• Architecture-neutral
• Interpreted
• High performance
• Distributed
• Dynamic

Let us examine some of this what it implies:

Simple

Java was designed to be easy for the professional programmer to learn and use effectively. Assuming that you have some programming experience, you have some programming experience, you will not find java hard to master. If you already understand the basic concepts of object-oriented programming, learning java will be even easier. Best of all, if you are an experienced C++ programmer, moving to java will require very little effort. Because java inherits the C/C++ syntax and many of the object-oriented features of C++, most programmers have little trouble learning java. Also, some of the more confusing concepts from C++ are either left out of java or implemented in a cleaner, more approachable manner.

Object-Oriented

Although influenced by its predecessors, java was not designed to be source-code compatible with any other language. This allowed the java team the freedom to design with a blank slate. One outcome of this was a clean, usable, pragmatic approach to objects. Borrowing liberally from many seminal object-software environments of the last few decades, java manages to strike a balance between the purist's `everything is an object` paradigm and the pragmatist's `stay out of my way` model. The object model in java is simple and easy to extend, while simple types, such as integers, are kept as high-performance non-objects.

Robust

The multi plat formed environment of the Web places extraordinary demands on a program, because the program must execute reliably in a variety of systems. Thus, the ability to create robust programs was given a high priority in the design of java. To gain reliability, java restricts you in a few key areas, to force you to find your mistakes early in program development. At the same time, java frees you from having to worry about many of the most common causes of programming errors. Because java is a strictly typed language, it checks your code at compile time. However, it also checks your code at run time. In fact, many hard-to-track-down bugs that often turn up in hard-to-reproduce run-time situations are simply impossible to create in Java. Knowing that what you have written will behave in a predictable way under diverse conditions is key feature of java.

To better understand how java is robust, consider tow of the main reasons for program failure: memory management mistakes and mishandled exceptional conditions (that is, run-time errors).