Evolution of Java

Evolution

Java has, over the years, undergone a series of changes and evolved into the robust language that it is today.

Java Origins: Embedded Systems (1991-1994)

In 1991, at Sun, c++ was found to be unsuitable for a project on embedded electronics and a need for a portable and platform-independent language arose. Therefore, James Gosling and others created a new language, initially called “Oak” and later renamed to Java. Java failed to capture the market.

Java: A Client-side Wonder (1995-1997)

In 1995, web pages did not have dynamic capability. Java provide this capability. Later, Java gained popularity and served as ideal software for networked computers.

Java: Moved into the middle-tier (1997 to Present)

In the late 1990’s, Sun revised middle-tier capabilities for Java to ensure that it runs on Web/Application Servers. In 1997, Sun defined servlets for java to generate dynamic HTML web pages. Sun also defined Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) so that business logic can be developed in java. In 1999, sun offered a middle-tier solution for java called java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE).

Platform

A platform is a hardware or software environment in which a program runs. Some of the commonly used platforms are Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris. A number of these platforms such as Linux and Solaris are a combination of operating system and underlying hardware components

The java platform can be considered as an execution engine referred to as virtual engine and not a specific operating system or hardware.

The java platform comprises two essential components:-

The java virtual machine (JVM): The java virtual machine (JVM) is the java runtime environment and is available on different operating systems. It serves as the intermediary between a java program and a host computer. JVM executes compiled java programs (byte codes).
The Java Application Programming Interface (API): Java APIs contain vast libraries of classes and other software components such as interfaces. These are included as a part of the java SDK. Newer releases of Java APIs provide enhanced features with introduction of new class libraries and packages.

Evolution of XML

Evolution of XML

In order to address the issues raised by earlier markup languages, the Extensible Markup Language (XML) was created XML is a W3C recommendation.

XML is a set of rules for defining semantic tags that break a document into parts and identify the different parts of the document. XML was developed over HTML because of the basic differences between them.

HTML	XML
HTML was designed to display data.	XML was designed to carry data.
HTML displays data and focuses on how data looks.	XML describes data and focuses on what data is.
HTML displays information.	XML describes information.

FIG: Difference between HTML and XML

An XML code:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”iso-8859-1”?>
<watch>
<name>Titan</name>
<price>$50</price>
<description> A bright brown fox jumps over the lazy dog</description>
</watch>

Features of XML

Features of XML are as follows:

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language
XML is a markup language much like HTML
XML was designed to describe data
XML tags are not predefined. You must define your own tags
XML uses a DTD or an XML Schema to describe the data
XML with a DTD or XML Schema is designed to be self-descriptive

XML Markup

XML markup defines the physical and logical layout of the document. XML can be considered as an information container. It contains shapes labels. Structures and also protects information. XML employs a tree-based structure to represent a document. The basic foundation of XML is laid down by symbols embedded in the text known as markup. The markup combines the text and extra information about the text such as its structure and presentation. The markup divides the information into a hierarchy of character data and container-like elements and its attributes. A number of software programs process electronic documents use a markup.

XML’s markup divides a document into separate information containers calld elements. A document consists of one outermost element called root element that contains all the other elements. Plus some optional administrative information at the top. Known as XML declaration. Following code demonstrates the elements.

Code Snippet:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”iso-8859-1” ?>
<FlowerPlanet>
<Name>Rose</Name>
<Price>$1</Price>
<Description>Red in color</Description>
<Number>700</Number>
</FlowerPlanet>

Where,

<Name>, <Price>, <Description> and <Number> inside the tags are elements.

<FlowerPlanet> and </FlowerPlanet> are the root elements.

The usage of XML can be observed in many real-life scenarios. It can be used in the fields of information sharing, single application usage, content delivery, re-use of data, separation of data and presentation, semantics, and so forth. News agencies are a common place where XML is used. News producers and news consumers often use a standard specification name XMLNews to produce, retrieve, and relay information across different systems in the world.

Note: XML is a subset of SGML, with the same goals, but with as much of the complexity eliminated as possible. This means that any document which follows XML’s syntax rules will also follow SGML’s syntax rules, and can therefore be read by existing SGML tools.

Evolution of Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing provides us means by which we can access the applications as utilities over the internet. It allows us to create, configure, and customize the business applications online.

Cloud computing is an approach enabling convenient and on-demand access through the Internet to resources such as networks, servers, storage, applications, and services.

Cloud computing evolved from a concept called virtualization. Virtualization is the process of creating a virtual version of an operating system (OS), a server, or network resources. Using virtualization, you can host multiple OSes at the same time on a single machine.

A traditional application server may have just 5-10% utilization, whereas virtualized servers can reach 50-80% utilization. By hosting more virtualized instances on fewer physical servers, you can lower costs for hardware acquisition, maintenance, energy, and cooling system usage.

Although virtualization offers many benefits, it was not enough because companies began to have many new needs such as on-demand scalability, zero capital expenditure, usage of software as a service, and so forth. Moreover, managing large numbers of virtual machines posed problems. Added to this were the issues of disaster management and data recovery.

Advantages

Companies often cannot predict whether their customer base is going to grow or shrink. If they map their infrastructure to a large potential customer base but the growth does not reach that level, then the huge infrastructure is a waste. On the other hand, if companies underestimate their growth an plan for a small infrastructure, they could lose potential customers. What is required in such scenarios is the capability to scale the infrastructure up or down depending on the demand of the hour. This capability is called elasticity and is one of the biggest advantages of cloud computing.

Another key advantage of cloud computing is that of failover capabilities. Failover is a mechanism in which tasks from a primary system are automatically offloaded to a secondary standby during system failure or pre-planned downtime.

Evolution Of Symbian OS

Symbian originated from EPOC, an operating system created by Psion in the 1980s. In June 1998, Psion Software became Symbian Ltd., a major joint venture between Psion and phone manufacturers Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia.

Afterwards, different software platforms were created for Symbian, backed by different groups of mobile phone manufacturers. They include S60 (Nokia, Samsung and LG), UIQ (Sony Ericsson and Motorola) and MOAP(S) (Japanese only such as Fujitsu, Sharp etc.).

In June 2008, Nokia announced the acquisition of Symbian Ltd., and a new independent non-profit organization called the Symbian Foundation was established. Symbian OS and its associated user interfaces S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) were contributed by their owners Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson and Symbian Ltd., to the foundation with the objective of creating the Symbian platform as a royalty-free, open source software, under the OSI- and FSF-approved Eclipse Public License (EPL). The platform has been designated as the successor to Symbian OS, following the official launch of the Symbian Foundation in April 2009. The Symbian platform was officially made available as open source code in February 2010.

Nokia became the major contributor to Symbian's code, since it then possessed the development resources for both the Symbian OS core and the user interface. Since then Nokia has been maintaining its own code repository for the platform development, regularly releasing its development to the public repository. Symbian was intended to be developed by a community led by the Symbian Foundation, which was first announced in June 2008 and which officially launched in April 2009. Its objective was to publish the source code for the entire Symbian platform under the OSI- and FSF-approved Eclipse Public License (EPL). The code was published under EPL on 4 February 2010; Symbian Foundation reported this event to be the largest codebase moved to Open Source in history.

However, some important components within Symbian OS were licensed from third parties, which prevented the foundation from publishing the full source under EPL immediately; instead much of the source was published under a more restrictive Symbian Foundation License (SFL) and access to the full source code was limited to member companies only, although membership was open to any organisation.

In November 2010, the Symbian Foundation announced that due changes in global economic and market conditions (and also a lack of support from members such as Samsung and Sony Ericsson), it would transition to a licensing-only organisation; Nokia announced it would take over the stewardship of the Symbian platform. Symbian Foundation will remain the trademark holder and licensing entity and will only have non-executive directors involved.

On 11 February 2011, Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft that would see it adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, and Symbian will be its franchise platform (dropping Symbian as its main smartphone OS of choice). As a consequence, the use of the Symbian platform for building mobile applications dropped rapidly. Research in June 2011 indicated that over 39% of mobile developers using Symbian at the time of publication were planning to abandon the platform.

By 5 April 2011, Nokia ceased to openly source any portion of the Symbian software and reduced its collaboration to a small group of pre-selected partners in Japan. Source code released under the EPL remains available in third party repositories.

On 22 June 2011, Nokia made an agreement with Accenture for an outsourcing program. Accenture will provide Symbian-based software development and support services to Nokia through 2016; about 2,800 Nokia employees became Accenture employees as of October 2011. The transfer was completed on 30 September 2011.

On 1 January 2014, with Nokia shifting their developer support away from Symbian, developers will not be able to publish new Symbian applications or content into the Nokia Store. However, existing Nokia Store content can still be downloaded.

Evolution of Java

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