5. Java technology

5.1 Java portability

Java is an object-oriented language. In March 1997, Sun Microsystems Inc. took the first step towards standardizing the language. The history of Java is described on the web server http: / / java.sun.com. Java's promoters describe it as a simple, distributed, robust, secure, architecture-independent, portable, efficient, multithreaded and dynamic language. It's distributed, because the classes in the java.net package can be used to write network applications. It's multithreaded, because the classes in the java.lang package make it easy to create lightweight concurrent processes. It's dynamic, because classes can be dynamically loaded at runtime: the running application is likely to evolve.

An application can dynamically load classes, but...