Java (programming language) definition

Java is a programming language (type of human-friendly instruction code) which, after being compiled (optimised and translated) into an executable, can run on other platforms (computers) which has the "Java Virtual Machine" installed and running. It was developed by James Gosling in the 1990's and ultimately named "Java" after a type of coffee from Indonesia.

For software (programs) to run, the executable's/software's instructions must match the "byte-code" language (ISA) of the underlying system, thus multi-compilations and deployments might be needed. Otherwise an emulator program or such must be used to effectively translate, of which Java relies on the "virtual machine" as the former. Java thus only has to be compiled once into Java's byte code before being deployed, whereas JVM itself is compiled in numerous ISA's and thus can be installed and ran on many popular platforms. This means software developers can write a Java application which can run on many (but not all) machines, without having to compile another copy that is translated to the target ISA or rewriting the code. JVM also does more memory and other resource management, taking some burden off the developers while also helping the end-user's application to run as intended. However, certain kinds of programs that need more resources (such as memory, file storage or graphics processing) might still struggle or not work at all; JVM's themselves that are outdated, corrupted or misconfigured may also cause local issues which the Java application cannot detect or fix.