The Java Buzzwords
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:
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
Two of these buzzwords have already been discussed: secure and portable. Let’s examine what each of the others 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 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.
Beyond its similarities with C/C++, Java has another attribute that makes it easy to learn: it makes an effort not to have surprising features. In Java, there are a small number of clearly defined ways to accomplish a given task.
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 nonobjects.
Robust
The multiplatformed 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 a key feature of Java.
To better understand how Java is robust, consider two of the main reasons for program failure: memory management mistakes and mishandled exceptional conditions (that is, run-time errors). Memory management can be a difficult, tedious task in traditional programming environments. For example, in C/C++, the programmer must manually allocate and free all dynamic memory. This sometimes leads to problems, because programmers will either forget to free memory that has been previously allocated or, worse, try to free some memory that another part of their code is still using. Java virtually eliminates these problems by managing memory allocation and deallocation for you. (In fact, deallocation is completely automatic, because Java provides garbage collection for unused objects.) Exceptional conditions in traditional environments often arise in situations such as division by zero or “file not found,” and they must be managed with clumsy and hard-to-read constructs. Java helps in this area by providing object-oriented exception handling. In a well-written Java program, all run-time errors can—and should—be managed by your program.
Multithreaded
Java was designed to meet the real-world requirement of creating interactive, networked programs. To accomplish this, Java supports multithreaded programming, which allows you to write programs that do many things simultaneously. The Java run-time system comes with an elegant yet sophisticated solution for multiprocess synchronization that enables you to construct smoothly running interactive systems. Java’s easy-to-use approach to multithreading allows you to think about the specific behavior of your program, not the multitasking subsystem.
Architecture-Neutral
A central issue for the Java designers was that of code longevity and portability. One of the main problems facing programmers is that no guarantee exists that if you write a program today, it will run tomorrow—even on the same machine. Operating system upgrades, processor upgrades, and changes in core system resources can all combine to make a program malfunction. The Java designers made several hard decisions in the Java language and the Java Virtual Machine in an attempt to alter this situation. Their goal was “write once; run anywhere, any time, forever.” To a great extent, this goal was accomplished.
Interpreted and High Performance
As described earlier, Java enables the creation of cross-platform programs by compiling into an intermediate representation called Java bytecode. This code can be interpreted on any system that provides a Java Virtual Machine. Most previous attempts at crossplatform solutions have done so at the expense of performance. Other interpreted systems, such as BASIC, Tcl, and PERL, suffer from almost insurmountable performance deficits. Java, however, was designed to perform well on very low-power CPUs. As explained earlier, while it is true that Java was engineered for interpretation, the Java bytecode was carefully designed so that it would be easy to translate directly into native machine code for very high performance by using a just-in-time compiler. Java run-time systems that provide this feature lose none of the benefits of the platform-independent code. “High-performance cross-platform” is no longer an oxymoron.
Distributed
Java is designed for the distributed environment of the Internet, because it handles TCP/IP protocols. In fact, accessing a resource using a URL is not much different from accessing a file. The original version of Java (Oak) included features for intraaddress-space messaging. This allowed objects on two different computers to execute procedures remotely. Java revived these interfaces in a package called Remote Method Invocation (RMI). This feature brings an unparalleled level of abstraction to client/server programming.
Dynamic
Java programs carry with them substantial amounts of run-time type information that is used to verify and resolve accesses to objects at run time. This makes it possible to dynamically link code in a safe and expedient manner. This is crucial to the robustness of the applet environment, in which small fragments of bytecode may be dynamically updated on a running system.
The Continuing Revolution
The Continuing Revolution
The initial release of Java was nothing short of revolutionary, but it did not mark the end of Java’s era of rapid innovation. Unlike most other software systems that usually settle into a pattern of small, incremental improvements, Java continued to evolve at an explosive pace. Soon after the release of Java 1.0, the designers of Java had already created Java 1.1. The features added by Java 1.1 were more significant and substantial than the increase in the minor revision number would have you think. Java 1.1 added many new library elements, redefined the way events are handled by applets, and reconfigured many features of the 1.0 library. It also deprecated (rendered obsolete) several features originally defined by Java 1.0. Thus, Java 1.1 both added and subtracted attributes from its original specification.
The next major release of Java was Java 2. Java 2 was a watershed event, marking the beginning of the “modern age” of this rapidly evolving language! The first release of Java 2 carried the version number 1.2. It may seem odd that the first release of Java 2 used the 1.2 version number. The reason is that it originally referred to the version of the Java libraries, but it was generalized to refer to the entire release, itself. Java 2 added support for a number of new features, such as Swing and the Collections framework, and it enhanced the Java Virtual Machine and various programming tools. Java 2 also contained a few deprecations. The most important affected the Thread class in which the methods suspend( ), resume( ), and stop( ) were deprecated.
The next release of Java was Java 2, version 1.3. This version of Java was the first major upgrade to the original Java 2 release. For the most part it added to existing functionality and “tightened up” the development environment. In general, programs written for version 1.2 and those written for version 1.3 are source-code compatible. Although version 1.3 contained a smaller set of changes than the preceding three major releases, it was nevertheless important.
The current release of Java is Java 2, version 1.4. This release contains several important upgrades, enhancements, and additions. For example, it adds the new keyword assert, chained exceptions, and a channel-based I/O subsystem. It also makes changes to the Collections Framework and the networking classes. In addition, numerous small changes are made throughout. Despite the significant number of new features, version 1.4 maintains nearly 100 percent source-code compatibility with prior versions.
This book covers all versions of Java 2. Of course, most of the material applies to earlier versions of Java, too. Throughout this book, when a feature applies to a specific version of Java, it will be so noted. Otherwise, you can simply assume that it applies to Java, in general. Also, when referring to those features common to all versions of Java 2, this book will simply use the term Java 2, without a reference to a version number.
