Java and the Internet


Introduction
The past four years have seen a phenomenal rise in interest in the Internet. Tens of millions of users regularly access this network to carry out operations such as browsing through electronic newspapers, downloading bibliographies, participating in news groups and emailing friends and colleagues. The number of applications that are hosted within the Internet has also grown; however, there are major problems in developing such applications:

• The first problem is security. There are still many problems concerned with ensuring that unauthorized access is prevented. This is becoming one of the major drag factors why commercial applications, particularly those involving the direct transfer of funds across communication lines, have been relatively slow in developing as compared with academic applications.
• The lack of a specific programming language for Internet applications. Currently applications are written in a wide variety of languages including C, Pascal and TCL/TK which have to access fairly low-level facilities such as protocol handlers.
• It is very difficult to build interaction into an Internet application. Most of the applications that have been developed tend to give the impression of being interactive. However, what they usually involve is just the user moving through a series of text and visual images following pointers to other sections of text and visual images. The most one often gets with the vast majority of Internet applications is some small amount of interactivity, for example an application asking the user for an identity and a password and checking what has been typed against some stored data which describes the user.
• The majority of interactive applications are non-portable: they tend to be firmly anchored within one computer architecture and operating system by virtue of the fact, for example, that they tend to use run-time facilities provided by one specific operating system.
The language.
The Java programming language originated at Sun Microsystems. It was developed initially as a programming language for consumer-electronics products; however, its later versions address the problems that have been outlined in the previous section. The designers of the language had a number of design goals:
• The language should be familiar. It should have no strange syntax and, as much as possible, it should look like an existing language. However, this principle was not taken to the point where problems with other languages would be carried through to Java. The control structures and data types in Java look like some of those provided in the C programming language, while those facilities which make it object-oriented resemble those in the programming language C++. The developers of the Java language felt that on both commercial and technical grounds Java would have the greatest success if the learning curve was not too steep. Its similarity to the C family of programming languages means that a wide variety of users are able to program in it: ranging from professionals at the cutting edge of Internet technology to the home computer user.