Java is a programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 originally developed by James Gosling

James Gosling

James A. Gosling, OC is a computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language.-Education and career:In 1977, Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary...

 at Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 (now part of Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...

) and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 and C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

 but has a simpler object model

Object model

In computing, object model has two related but distinct meanings:# The properties of objects in general in a specific computer programming language, technology, notation or methodology that uses them. For example, the Java objects model, the COM object model, or the object model of OMT...

 and fewer low-level

Low-level programming language

In computer science, a low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture. Generally this refers to either machine code or assembly language...

 facilities. Java applications are typically compiled

Compiler

A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...

 to bytecode

Java bytecode

Java bytecode is the form of instructions that the Java virtual machine executes. Each bytecode opcode is one byte in length, although some require parameters, resulting in some multi-byte instructions. Not all of the possible 256 opcodes are used. 51 are reserved for future use...

 (class file

Class (file format)

In the Java programming language, source files are compiled into machine-readable class files which have a .class extension. Since Java is a platform-independent language, source code is compiled into an output file known as bytecode, which it stores in a .class file. If a source file has more...

) that can run on any Java Virtual Machine

Java Virtual Machine

A Java virtual machine is a virtual machine capable of executing Java bytecode. It is the code execution component of the Java software platform. Sun Microsystems stated that there are over 4.5 billion JVM-enabled devices.-Overview:...

 (JVM) regardless of computer architecture

Computer architecture

In computer science and engineering, computer architecture is the practical art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals and the formal modelling of those systems....

.
Java is a general-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented language that is specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible.