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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>Chapter 1. A Modern Language</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="core.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.74.0"/></head><body><div class="chapter" title="Chapter 1. A Modern Language"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h1 class="title"><a id="learnjava3-CHP-1"/>Chapter 1. A Modern Language</h1></div></div></div><p><a id="I_indexterm1_id557780" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id557788" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id557795" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id557802" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id557810" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id557817" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632222" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632230" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632238" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632245" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632253" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632260" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632268" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632275" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632283" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632290" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632298" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632306" class="indexterm"/><a id="I_indexterm1_id632313" class="indexterm"/> The greatest challenges and most exciting opportunities for
software developers today lie in harnessing the power of networks.
Applications created today, whatever their intended scope or audience, will
almost certainly run on machines linked by a global network of computing
resources. The increasing importance of networks is placing new demands on
existing tools and fueling the demand for a rapidly growing list of
completely new kinds of applications.</p><p>We want software that works—consistently, anywhere, on any
platform—and that plays well with other applications. We want dynamic
applications that take advantage of a connected world, capable of accessing
disparate and distributed information sources. We want truly distributed
software that can be extended and upgraded seamlessly. We want intelligent
applications that can roam the Net for us, ferreting out information and
serving as electronic emissaries. We have known for some time what kind of
software we want, but it is really only in the past few years that we have
begun to get it.</p><p>The problem, historically, has been that the tools for building these
applications have fallen short. The requirements of speed and portability
have been, for the most part, mutually exclusive, and security has been
largely ignored or misunderstood. In the past, truly portable languages were
bulky, interpreted, and slow. These languages were popular as much for their
high-level functionality as for their portability. Fast languages usually
provided speed by binding themselves to particular platforms, so they met
the portability issue only halfway. There were even a few safe languages,
but they were primarily offshoots of the portable languages and suffered
from the same problems. Java is a modern language that addresses all three
of these fronts: portability, speed, and security. This is why it has been a
dominant language in the world of programming for more than a decade and a
half.</p></div></body></html>