Features of Java Language

From the original Sun Java whitepaper: "Java is a simple object-oriented, distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architecture-neutral , portable, high performance, multi-threaded, and dynamic language."

Java features are also know as Java Buzzword. Here are some original Java buzzwords....

• Simple 
• Secure
• Portable
• Object-Oriented
• Robust
• Multi threaded
• Architectural neutral
•  Interpreted
• High performance
• Distributed
• Dynamic

Simple:

•  Very simple C/C++ syntax , operators etc
•  Java inherits many of the  object oriented features of C++.
•  The core language is simpler than C++, no operator overloading, no pointers, and no multiple inheritance
•  The way a java program deals with memory is much simpler than C and C++. 

Secure: 

• Java achieves protection by confining a Java program to the Java execution environment (JVM) and not allowing it access to other parts of the computer. 
• Java runtime Security Manager  can check which operations a particular piece of code is  allowed to do. As a result. java can run un-trusted code in a "sandbox" where, for example, it can draw to the screen but cannot access the local file system.

Portable: 

• For Java "Write Once Run Anywhere" , and for most part this work. 
• When you compile a Java program, a .class file (bytecode) is created, and you can run it on any platform e.g. Window, Linux, MAC.  
• Not even a recompile is required , a Java executable can work, without change, on any Java enabled platform.

  

Object Oriented: 

• Java is fundamentally based on the OOP notions of classes and objects.
• Java uses a fundamental OOP type system that must be obeyed at compile-time and run-time.

Robust:

  Robust means reliable and Java is robust and secure as there are many  features which support this concept.

• Crash Recovery
• Exceptional Handling
• Strict Run-time checking
• No pointers
• Memory Management  

Multithreaded:

• Java  support multithreaded  programming, which allows you to write programs that do many things simultaneously.
• Threads are important for multi-media , web applications etc.

Architecture-neutral:

• Java is platform independent language.
• There is no implementation dependent feature e.g size of primitive data type is fixed.
• This was made with goal "write once; run anytime , any where , forever".

High Performance:

• Java bytecode was designed so that it would be easy to translate directly into native machine code for very high performance by using a just-in-time compiler. 

 Distributed:

• Java is designed for distributed environment of the Internet, because it handles TCP/IP protocols. 
• The original version of Java(Oak) included features for intra address-space messaging. This allowed objects on two different computers to execute procedures remotely. Java revived these interfaces in a package called Remote Method Invocation(RMI).

 Dynamic:

• Class and type information is kept around at runtime. This enables runtime loading and inspection of code in a very flexible way.