Enter Java - a language of great elegance, power and, most importantly, simplicity. Designed by James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems, Java became a phenomenon that won hearts and minds, changed the rules of enterprise programming and seriously wounded Microsoft. Yet despite its glory, Java lost one of the most important battles - the battle for the web browser. In this post we look at what happened to Java in the last decade, from its glorious rise, to market politics, to the battle for the browser.

The Beauty Of Java

The first great thing about the core Java language was that it was simple. The creators of the language made assumptions and compromises and decided to take away some power from programmers, but the benefits by far outweighed the limitations. The second great thing was the virtual machine. To make a C++ program run on another platform required a lot of effort. Java programs, on the other hand, were portable automatically.

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