Foreword

Java has been a part of my career and my life nearly since its beginning. I started using Java 1.0 in 1996, and joined the Java team at Sun later that year. It was a rocky beginning, but something quite special happened: Many brilliant people brought together countless ideas to create a platform that changed how people think about software. Many existing companies adopted Java as a core technology, and many new companies were formed either to add to the Java ecosystem or to leverage it in another arena.

Java isn’t just a language. It is a platform that consists of many parts, including the Java language, the Java Virtual Machine (VM) core libraries, and many other components. These components make for a flexible, powerful, and versatile technology that reaches into the most diverse range of applications anywhere.

Java isn’t just a platform. It is its own ecosystem. Built on top of the Java platform are IDEs, monitoring and management tools, libraries, application servers, test and debug tools, development tools, and, of course, applications of almost every variety.

Developer usage has grown in the years I’ve worked on Java. In the late 1990s, developers were counted in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Today, Oracle reports that over nine million developers use Java. Deployments, including Java ME on consumer devices, measure in the billions.

Java continues to improve. By some measures, Oracle JDK performance has nearly tripled since JDK 5. These improvements reflect changes throughout the platform.

The improvements don’t stop with performance, but include a wide range of capabilities and features added in every release. The evolution of Java is carefully shepherded by talented technologists with a wide range of expertise who pay an enormous level of attention to maintaining compatibility and uniformity.

Even with this, the scope of a major Java release, combined with its occasional obscure characteristics, makes a book like Java Programming crucial for developers. Books like this one were a huge influence on the adoption of Java by millions of developers, including myself, and I am grateful that Poornachandra Sarang has the patience and skills needed, and has taken the time to effectively communicate the intricate details of the Java platform.

John Pampuch
Director, Java VM Technology, Oracle
December 15, 2011