HISTORY OF DEV

September 30, 2004

Java 5 (Tiger) released

SunSun Microsystems — maker of Java, Solaris, and SPARC; acquired by Oracle in 2010. released JavaA portable language running on the JVM — dominant in enterprise servers, Android, and big data. 5 on September 30, 2004 — adding genericsType parameters in languages — write one class or function that works with many types safely., enums, autoboxing, enhanced for-loops, and annotations.

What it was for

James GoslingJavaA portable language running on the JVM — dominant in enterprise servers, Android, and big data. 5 was the biggest language change since JavaA portable language running on the JVM — dominant in enterprise servers, Android, and big data. 1.0: `List<String>` replaced raw collections, `@Override` caught typos at compile time, and foreach loops cleaned up iteration. Every enterprise codebase written in the 2000s eventually migrated to Tiger's syntax.

Companies

  • Sun Microsystems

Why it's here

GenericsType parameters in languages — write one class or function that works with many types safely. and annotations defined modern JavaA portable language running on the JVM — dominant in enterprise servers, Android, and big data. style for a decade.

Why it mattered

Type-safe collections eliminated casts and ClassCastException bugs in production.

What it solved

Raw types and verbose loops made large JavaA portable language running on the JVM — dominant in enterprise servers, Android, and big data. codebases error-prone and hard to read.

Media

  • James Gosling
    ImageJames Gosling

    Peter Campbell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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