Harlan McGhan

When Sun Microsystems introduced the Java programming language in May 1995, it handed developers the programmer's equivalent of the holy grail. Java's promise of write once, run anywhere proved real. For the first time, developers could write their source code just once, run it across multiple platforms without modification and generate bit-for-bit identical results. Now, less than three years later, Java technology has become more than just a wildly popular development environment; it has enabled the creation of a whole class of new computing devices called "thin-clients" that were not imaginable three years ago. The Java Model Following a close examination of the Java environment, Sun concluded that it could significantly enhance the Java paradigm by migrating the execution of bytecode instructions from software in the Java Virtual Machine to hardware in a Java p... (more)