Java is a product of Sun Microsystems with its principal creator being James Gosling. If one talks to Sun, that is if one reaches for the general corporate message about Java, one is told that Java is much more than a programming language. It is portrayed as a comprehensive environment for allowing software to be written and to operate in a network environment. In fact, Java does encompass many of these far-reaching characteristics. But, from our perspective, the most interesting characteristics are those that would portray Java as a language; in particular, a powerful object-oriented language. As with the C language, Java adopts the algebraic formula constructs first popularized in FORTRAN. But, it is in the formulation of its object-orientedness that Java offers some significant enhancements to the metaphorical abstraction process that object-oriented programming brings to the table.

Java was originally written to be moved around various computer platforms of a wide-area network and to run wherever it found temporary or permanent residence. To enable this capability, a Java program had to be well insulated from the environment in which it found itself; it had to operate within a highly restricted sensori-motor environment. The greater the sensori-motor facilities required by a program, the greater was the surrounding support environment. In the extreme, the support environment could be so comprehensive that it was likely to be found on only a small portion of the platforms in a wide-area network. However, as Java was thrust forward to compete with the entrenched operating systems of the day, with Windows or UNIX, it had to adopt many of the heavy-weighted facilities of those systems. But, where Java could be viewed in its more focused context as a programming language, it offered some truly mutational characteristics. Principal among these is security.

A Java program was envisioned as an instruction set for a virtual computer. This has proven a valuable trait for other languages and other environments. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Java was the provision of a protected context for that virtual computer; this context was termed a sandbox. It is a very telling metaphor. Many of us remember a sandbox as a playtime environment from our formative years. It was an environment in which we could construct a variety of make-believe worlds, products of our own innovation guided by our own perceptions of the world around us as evidenced by our sensori-motor experiences. Indeed, as we will see just a bit later, sandboxes tend to be relished during the cognitive development stage in which fantasy is a significant aspect of the way that we think. If sandboxes were well constructed, each child’s area was distinctly separate from others. If more than one was to play in a sandbox at one time, it was truly necessary for us to play nicely together. If we could not accomplish this, then the experience was probably going to turn out badly. Within one sandbox, it was just too easy to destroy the adjacent imaginary worlds. This is perhaps a bit more of a buildup than is necessary to talk about Java, but it is central to the metaphorical constructs that Java enables.

In its earliest incarnations, Java enabled its sandbox through the characteristics of the language itself. The language provided constructs that allowed a programmer to exploit fully the extent of the sandbox, but the language would not allow a program even to refer to the areas outside of the sandbox. As we have previously noted, if a high-level language does not encompass certain abstractions, it can be very difficult or even impossible to carry on a discourse about these abstractions. For example, Java allowed a programmer to establish a data domain in the form of objects. If the Java compiler then followed the rules of Java, the program could not even refer to objects that were not of its own creation. One could simply not express the thought to “read data from an object outside the sandbox.”

Because of market pressures, Java has evolved in the direction of a more traditional language and computer-programming environment. The earlier purity of its methodology was extremely well

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