• Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems.
• It has: garbage collection, multithreading and exception handling.
• It does not have: architecture-dependent constructs, structs, unions, pointer arithmetic, operator-overloading and multiple inheritance.
• It is accompanied by many packages (each of which is a group of related classes). Each package forms an Application Programming Interface or API. One of the key packages is one for building GUIs (graphical user interfaces).
• The definition of the Java language and its accompanying APIs is known as the Java 2 Platform. The current version is Version 1.4.2.