Java Version-: We know that the java developed in 1990 by the American company. Java was developed Sun Micro-systems .The first stable Java version released by Sun Microsystems could be downloaded from the website as an archive named JDK 1.0.2. JDK is an acronym for Java Development Kit. This is the software development environment used for developing Java applications and applets. It includes the Java Run-time Environment (JRE) , an interpreter (loader), a compiler, an archiver, a documentation generator, and other tools needed for Java development. We will get into this more when I cover how to install the JDK on our computer.
Starting with version 1.2 released in 1998, Java versions were given codenames.5 The Java version 1.2 codename was Playground. It was a massive release and this was the moment when people started talking about the Java 2 Platform. Starting with this version, the releases up to J2SE 5.0 were renamed, and J2SE replaced JDK because the Java platform was now composed of three parts here …
- J2SE (Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition), which later became JSE, a computing platform for the development and deployment of portable code for desktop and server environments
- J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition), which later became JEE, a set of specifications extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web services
- J2ME (Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition), which later became JME, a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for embedded and mobile devices
Releasing the JIT compiler became part of Sun Microsystem’s JVM (which basically means turning code into executable code became a faster operation and the generated executable code was optimized), the Swing graphical API was introduced as a fancy alternative to AWT (new components to create fancy desktop applications were introduced) and the Java collections framework (for working with sets of data) was introduced.
J2SE 1.3 was released in 2000 with the codename Kestrel (maybe as a reference to the newly introduced Java sound classes). This release also contained Java XML APIs.
J2SE 1.4 was released in 2002 with the codename Merlin. This is the first year that the Java Community Process members were involved in deciding which features the release should contain and thus the release was quite consistent. This is the first release of the Java platform developed under the Java Community Process as JSR 59.6 The following features are among those worth mentioning.
- Support for IPv6 (basically applications that run over a network can now be written to work using networking protocol IPv6).
- Non-blocking IO (IO is an acronym for input-output, which refers to reading and writing data— a very slow operation. Making IO non-blocking means to optimize these operations to increase speed of the running application.)
- Logging API (Operations that get executed need to be reported to a file or a resource, which can be read in case of failure to determine the cause and find a solution. This process is called logging and apparently only in this version components to support this operation were introduced.)
- Image processing API (Components developers can use this to manipulate images with Java code.)
J2SE 5.0 was released in 2004 with the codename Tiger. Initially, it followed the typical versioning, and was named 1.5, but because this was a major release with a significant number of new features that proved a serious improvement of maturity, stability, scalability, and security of the J2SE, the version was labeled 5.0 and presented like that to the public, even if internally 1.5 was still used.
In 2006, Java SE 6 was released with a little delay, with the codename Mustang. This was the last major Java release by Sun Microsystems. Oracle acquired the company in January 2010.
In December 2008, Java FX 1.0 SDK was released. JavaFX is used to create graphical user interfaces for any platform, and the initial version was a scripting language. Until 2008, there were two ways to create a user interface in Java
-
- AWT (Abstract Window Toolkit) components,This is rendered and controlled by a native peer component specific to the underlying operating system that is why AWT components are also called heavyweight components .
- Swing components It is called lightweight because they do not require allocation of native resources in the operating system’s windowing toolkit. The Swing API is a complimentary extension of AWT.
Oracle Take over and release java version-: Java SE 7, codename Dolphin, was the first Java version released by Oracle in 2011. It was the result of an extensive collaboration between Oracle engineers and members of the worldwide Java communities as like the OpenJDK Community and the Java Community Process (JCP). It contained a lot of changes but still a lot fewer than developers expected. After the long period between the releases the expectations were pretty high Project Lambda It was supposed to allow usage of lambda expressions in Java (this leads to considerable syntax simplification in certain cases) and Jigsaw (making JVM and the Java application modular.
JavaFX 2.0 was released with Java 7. This confirmed that the JavaFX project had a future with Oracle. As a major change, JavaFX stopped being a scripting language and became a Java API. This meant that knowledge of the Java language syntax would be enough to start building user graphical interfaces with it. JavaFX started gaining ground over Swing because of its hardware-accelerated graphical engine called Prism that did a better job at rendering.
Java SE 8, codename Spider, was released in 2014, and included features that were initially intended to be part of Java 7
Java SE 9 was released in September 2017. The long-awaited Jigsaw project was finally here.
Java SE 10 (AKA Java) was released on March 20, 2018. Oracle changed the Java release style, so a new version is released every six months.
Java SE 11 (AKA Java) released on 25 September 2018
JDK 12 was released on March 19, 2019. Among others, Java 12 includes a number of new features.