Wednesday, November 23th, 2005
at 5:30PM

A Q & A Session with the Inventor of Java

Java is a reflective, object-oriented programming language developed by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems in 1991. Initially called Oak (named after the oak trees outside Gosling's office), it was intended to replace C++, although the feature set better resembles that of Objective-C. After first being made public in 1994, it achieved prominence following the announcement at 1995's SunWorld that Netscape would be including support for it in their Navigator browser. Specifications of the Java language, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the Java API are community-maintained through the Sun-managed Java Community Process. James Gosling will be answering questions regarding Java's past, present, and future

James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints". He is currently a VP & Fellow at Sun Microsystems. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called 'Emacs' for Unix systems. At Sun his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. He has recently been a contributor to the Real-Time Specification for Java. He is currently a researcher at Sun labs where his primary interest is software development tools.