Java 2

Java is coolno really; I mean it. It has pretty much everything you need in a programming language. It's modern, flexible, powerful, and most of all, easy to use. Java's performance in these areas isn't by luck; it was designed that way.

James Gosling, an employee of Sun Microsystems, created Java in the early 1990s as a robust, cross-platform programming environment based on C++. However, James (and friends) took the opportunity to simplify things a little. They removed elements such as direct memory management and access (which was inherently unportable), templates, preprocessing, auto-casting, operator overloading, and multiple inheritance. The end result is a much simpler language to use than C++ but which still has a majority of the functionality you need for your software projects.

In addition to core language features, the various editions of Java provide a vast library of functionality that includes utilities for communications, databases, user interfaces, and other general purposes. Java is pretty much all you need, right out of the box. The combination of a compiler, APIs, a run-time environment (JVM), and other tools are collectively termed Java Software Development Kits, or SDKs.