In the really early days of Java, there wasn't: it started out as part of small-team project aimed at embedded systems, then set-top boxes http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/javaorigin.html . By the time work started on the specification, about 1995-6, Sun was soliciting feedback from a wider base of people http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m... http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m... http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m... . Even by '96 I think everyone was still mostly thinking of Java as a client-side Web and OS-native application language, though: it wasn't until later that it began to be strongly associated with server-side programming and "enterprisiness".

This is true. But at the point where Java broke out, there were a lot of big businesses behind it.

For instance even though Java 1.0 was released in 1996, IBM got on board in 1995 and by the start of 1997 had contributed good internationalization. (See http://www.icu-project.org/docs/papers/history_of_java_inter... for a reference.) By late 1997 when I became a software developer, there was already a feeling that Java was "the official corporate future of the web". (At least by those who didn't expect Microsoft to take over the world.) But in the meantime would I mind learning Perl and CGI to teach my co-workers how to get small stuff done?

I never looked back. :-)

ADDITION: See http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1998-09-11/news/990112009... for an early timeline. Note the many, many corporate licensees very early in the process.

The truth is that everyone was deathly afraid that Microsoft would destroy the industry. The web was seen as a godsend, and the fact that Java wound up tied to the web by Netscape right at the beginning meant that everyone jumped on Java with the web. By the time the dust settled, you had a ton of big corporations involved, and it was guaranteed at that point that the language would evolve to suit their needs.

Yup -- I was taking intro & mid-level CS courses in 1996/7, and they set us up to code in Java (with an IDE called Roaster) as the "wave of the future", and easier to work with than C or C++ (though we used C for some classes).

We were mostly writing applications, applets, and command-line stuff, and my first server-side code was in a long-forgotten CGI-based scripting language, but I seem to recall it wasn't too long after that that ColdFusion was re-written into Java (so that even if you build your site in CF, it was actually executing on Java); that was a pretty strong corporate & technical endorsement.

I would say that is true. Furthermore the Sun team had the advantage of starting with a group of people who had done extensive work on Smalltalk. This gave them both specific technical advantages, such as state of the art experience in JIT optimization, and the general advantage of starting with better OO design experience than was widely available.