Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. Unlike conventional languages which are generally either designed to be compiled to native (machine) code, or interpreted from source code at runtime, Java is intended to be compiled to a bytecode (though can be compiled to native code with gcj) which is then run (generally using JIT compilation) by a Java virtual machine.
The language itself borrows much syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities.
Java is only distantly related to JavaScript, though they have similar names and share a C-like syntax.
