Java History:
- James gosling initiated the project in the year 1991.
- Application developed from Islands of Indonesia.
- The application developed under the project name called “Green Project”
- Initially the application name is “Green talk” with program extension “gt”.
- They want to launch the application with name “OAK”
- As “OAK” already registered, they have assigned the name “java” to the application which was released in the year 1995.
- “Java” is a coffee bean name.
Versions:
- The first version released from James gosling organization “Sun Micro Systems”.
- The latest version of Java is Java 15 or JDK 15 released on September, 15th 2020 (follow this article to check Java version on your computer). See What are new features in JDK 15. JDK 16 is in progress with early-access builds.
- From the first version released in 1996 to the latest version 12 released in 2019, the Java platform has been actively being developed for about nearly 24 years.
- Many changes and improvements have been made to the technology over the years. The following table summarizes all versions of Java SE from its early days to the latest.
| Java SE Version | Version Number | Release Date |
| JDK 1.0(Oak) | 1.0 | January 1996 |
| JDK 1.1 | 1.1 | February 1997 |
| J2SE 1.2(Playground) | 1.2 | December 1998 |
| J2SE 1.3(Kestrel) | 1.3 | May 2000 |
| J2SE 1.4(Merlin) | 1.4 | February 2002 |
| J2SE 5.0(Tiger) | 1.5 | September 2004 |
| Java SE 6(Mustang) | 1.6 | December 2006 |
| Java SE 7(Dolphin) | 1.7 | July 2011 |
| Java SE 8 | 1.8 | March 2014 |
| Java SE 9 | 9 | September, 21st 2017 |
| Java SE 10 | 10 | March, 20th 2018 |
| Java SE 11 | 11 | September, 25th 2018 |
| Java SE 12 | 12 | March, 19th 2019 |
| Java SE 13 | 13 | September, 17th 2019 |
| Java SE 14 | 14 | March, 17th 2020 |
| Java SE 15 | 15 | September, 15th 2020 |
| Java SE 16 | 16 | Expected on March 2021 |
From the table above we can see that the naming and the version number have been changing over times:
- Versions 1.0 and 1.1 are named as JDK (Java Development Kit).
- From versions 1.2 to 1.4, the platform is named as J2SE (Java 2 Standard Edition).
- From versions 1.5, Sun introduces internal and external versions. Internal version is continuous from previous ones (1.5 after 1.4), but the external version has a big jump (5.0 for 1.5). This could make confusion for someone, so keep in mind that version 1.5 and version 5.0 are just two different version names for only one thing.
- From Java 6, the version name is Java SE X.
