Java is the programming language created by James Gosling that was first named Oak before being renamed.
James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems developed the language in the early 1990s for the Green project. Gosling initially called it Oak, reportedly after an oak tree outside his office. The name had to change because Oak was already a trademark associated with another company, so the team adopted the name Java in 1995.
Java’s design emphasized portability through the Java Virtual Machine. Instead of compiling directly for one processor architecture, Java source code is normally compiled into bytecode that a compatible virtual machine can execute. This approach was summarized by Sun’s slogan “write once, run anywhere.”
Java became especially influential in enterprise software, web servers, and Android development, although Android uses its own runtime and later added Kotlin as a supported language. Java is not the same language as JavaScript; the similar names resulted from a marketing association rather than shared implementation.