Chapter 1. Java, Databases, and Oracle

Sun Microsystems' Java programming language seems to have strayed far from its origin in 1991 as a language for networking consumer gadgets, such as a set-top for interactive television. It's tempting to frame the story as a rags-to-riches tale of a tiny language that far surpassed the lowly aspirations that its creators, James Gosling and his colleagues, had for it. Instead of being embedded inside toasters, TVs, and ovens; it's now running on some of the most powerful servers on the Internet, serving information to millions of people around the world. But this really only proves how successful their design was for a programming language designed for networking all kinds of devices.

The tale turned especially interesting on May 23, 1995, when Sun officially announced that Java was being released and that support for it would be built into Netscape's dominant Navigator browser.

It's hard to imagine now the excitement that this created then. Web pages that had been static were suddenly electric going online was transformed from a static, black and white landscape to a dynamic, colorful Oz. The San Jose Mercury News reported:

Many leading-edge designers today are buzzing about Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s new software that the Mountain View-based company hopes will turn the Web into a rocking new medium. The software enables producers to make the Web as lively as a CD-ROM, but with the added advantages of continuous updates and real-time interaction between people.

Java's platform independence made it possible to write and compile a client-side application that would run in any user's browser, regardless of whether their machine was a Unix box, a Macintosh, a Windows PC, or anything else supported by Netscape. These mostly tiny applications applets introduced scrolling text, sound, motion, and games that made browsing the Web a dynamic experience while strong security features preventing malicious actions by programs made it a more secure experience.

Java on the client side was one of the important forces that contributed to the Web's explosive growth over the next five years. It was this growth that set the stage for a new role for Java, on the server side.

The World Wide Web has grown from a virtual conference center for the academic community to a cosmopolitan bazaar of commerce, entertainment, and information exchange available to users of nearly every age, education level, and nationality. To develop and serve this new market, a diverse variety of applications have been and continue to be developed. And as it turns out, Java has matured into an excellent programming language for building these new applications and services, due to features such as network support, platform independence, and robustness, features that have been inherent in its core design from the beginning.

As the importance of Java as a server-side programming language has increased, Sun has dramatically expanded the number and types of features that support networking and distributed computing. According to Sun, the number of classes and interfaces in the Java standard edition has increased by an order of magnitude in a little over five years: from 212 in version 1.0 to 2,738 in version 1.4. Many of these new features are in packages supporting such things as security, networking, XML (Extensible Markup Language), RMI (Remote Method Invocation), naming services, and database connectivity.