Java and Distributed Systems
Niranjan Suri · 2015
When Java was introduced to the world at large 20 years ago, it brought many interesting features and capabilities into the mainstream computing environment. A Virtual Machine based approach with a just-in-time compiler that supported sandboxing, dynamic class loading, and introspection enabled a number of novel and innovative network-based applications to be developed. While many of these capabilities existed in some fashion in other prototype and experimental languages, the combination of all of them in a popular general purpose language opened up the possibility of building real systems that could leverage these capabilities. Applets, Jini, JXTA, and many other innovative concepts were introduced over the course of time, building on top of the basic capabilities of Java.