Well, yes and no. I'm old enough to remember when Java was launched, and I was getting paid to write Java in '96. At the time it was going to be a whole new way to write software - modular software made of components downloaded on the fly whenever you needed them. That is why package names work like that , com.sun.java.blah meant a class called Blah that you would grab from the server java.sun.com when you first instantiated it. Of course it didn't work out like that, it was only in the late 90s that Java morphed into a corporate back-end language. You can pinpoint when this happened when they rushed out the JDBC spec.