Javafied/Preface

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With lessons learnt from C and C++, Java emerged as a language of choice for the Internet programmer in its early days circa 1995. Many a programmers adopted this easy-to-use language almost instantly after its launch and why wouldn't they when it offered all the goodies in one bag: Automatic Garbage Collection, Graphics, Animation, Graphical User Interfaces, Platform Independence, Networking, Internationalisation and Documentation.

All that hype: Rise and fall of Java

The year 1996 saw Java develop a massive following as Usenet groups flooded with vast amounts of news and information about the language. The Java beta and 1.0 might have caused a huge noise in the development community, but it was the version 1.1 launch in March 1997 that led people into thinking "Can Java replace Windows?"¹.

People began measuring Java up against systems like Microsoft Windows and no matter how impressive Java seemed, people began scratching up tidbits against the language. Some said it was slow, some simply disliked it because the drawLine(...) method in the Graphics class drew a line that was of 1px width. And soon technical papers began appearing on websites benchmarking Java speeds and issues related to performance hits and glitches in Java programs. Java faded out.

The resurrection

With Java out of the scene, software vendors like Microsoft adopted almost all of the functionalities of Java (the Virtual Machine Bytecode, Garbage collection and Multithreading), plastered it over their existing products namely Visual C++ and Visual Basic to come out with a new language, C# and a brand new platform, .Net. Java was long forgotten. C# was now the language of choice for a programmer, a language with the same functionality as that of Java and the speed of C/C++. C# ruled over Java in all aspects.

Java started losing developers, heck, I was one of them. But then the minor version incremented. The 1.3 was now 1.4. Hope appeared at the horizon of neglect as streaks of bright red at sunrise would. The Java language was not dead yet! Still in beta it clambered, resurrected but to vain. C# development had juiced out half of developers once devoted Javaholics. A few months later Java incremented to 1.5, but this time Java had some major changes introduced into the language syntax to match some constructs like enum and the foreach loop equivalent common to C#. Java attracted a few more developers but it had yet to convince the end-users. Can it?

We'll be exploring how Java can be useful for developers and users both on the Windows platform in this book and will travel deep into the world of Java to learn what's new in Java.

Support

It doesn't just end with this book. We will try to provide ongoing support to readers of this book and keep on improving the text of the book through the discussion link on the top of each and every page of this book.

We would also be:

• providing a download section where the source-code (if any) could be downloaded.
• publishing FAQs on using this guide to overcome most of your problems.

Talkback

What makes an author more merrier than response? We welcome comments to the manuscript and would like to hear from all the readers of the book. If you'd like to talk to any of the authors of the book, go ahead and do so using the discussion link on top of the page.

Please let us know if there are any errors in this book, lest correct them yourself and provide us with your suggestions fro future editions.

References

1. Can Java replace Windows? http://pandonia.canberra.edu.au/java/auugjava/paper.html

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