Honorary Champion: James Gosling

“James Arthur Gosling” - Father of Java

James A. Gosling, O.C., Ph.D (born May 19, 1955 near Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is a famous software developer, best known as the father of the Java programming language.

Education and career:

In 1977, James Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary. In 1983, he earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and his doctoral thesis was titled “The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints”. While working towards his doctorate, he wrote a version of emacs (gosmacs), and before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multi-processor version of Unix[1] while at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as several compilers and mail systems.

Since 1984, Gosling has been with Sun Microsystems, and is generally known best as the founder of the Java programming language.

Contributions:

He is generally credited as the inventor of the Java programming language in 1994. He did the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. For this achievement he was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as News and Gosling Emacs. He also cowrote the “bundle” program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book The Unix Programming Environment. He also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint based drawing editor and a text editor called ‘Emacs' for Unix systems.

Over the years he has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers, as well as text and drawing editors.

At Carnegie-Mellon University in Philadelphia, he did his doctorate where he developed a text editor called “Emacs,” which became the most widely used Unix text editor. After completing his doctorate in computer science in 1983, Dr. Gosling worked briefly as a researcher for IBM and then, in September 1984, accepted an invitation to join a small startup company in California - Sun Microsystems. There he pursued his interest in networking techniques and products. In 1990 he became part of a team called the Green project that was developing new networking tools. The rise of the World Wide Web enabled him to conjure up a system where “applets” of applications move through the Internet and provide multimedia capabilities on any computer. Launched in 1995, Java has freed programmers from the confines of proprietary systems. Applications can run on computers across the Internet regardless of the operating system they use.

At Sun his early activity was as lead engineer of the NEWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine.

Currently, he is acting as Vice President and Sun Fellow with Sun Microsystems Inc. and actively contributing in sun's new innovations and products. He is still exploring the new java horizons.

Honours:

In Feb 2007, he was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada. The Order is Canada's highest civilian honour. Officers are the second highest grade.

Personal Corner:

He enjoys being an amateur chef and living in Redwood City, halfway between San Francisco and San Jose, with his wife Judy and daughters Kate and Kelsey.

Books:

He is also making a great contribution in providing the technical stuff. Here is a listing of his great contributions:

  • James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy L. Steele Jr., Gilad Bracha, The Java Language Specification, Third Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005, ISBN 0-321-24678-0
  • Ken Arnold, James Gosling, David Holmes, The Java Programming Language, Third Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2000, ISBN 0-201-70433-1
  • James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy L. Steele Jr., Gilad Bracha, The Java Language Specification, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2000, ISBN 0-201-31008-2
  • Gregory Bollella (Editor), Benjamin Brosgol, James Gosling, Peter Dibble, Steve Furr, David Hardin, Mark Turnbull, The Real-Time Specification for Java, Addison Wesley Longman, 2000, ISBN 0-201-70323-8
  • Ken Arnold, James Gosling, The Java programming language Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, 1997, ISBN 0-201-31006- 6
  • Ken Arnold, James Gosling, The Java programming language, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63455-4
  • James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy L. Steele Jr., The Java Language Specification, Addison Wesley Publishing Company, 1996, ISBN 0- 201-63451-1
  • James Gosling, Frank Yellin, The Java Team, The Java Application Programming Interface, Volume 2: Window Toolkit and Applets, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0- 201-63459-7
  • James Gosling, Frank Yellin, The Java Team, The Java Application Programming Interface, Volume 1: Core Packages, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63453- 8
  • James Gosling, Henry McGilton, The Java language Environment: A white paper, Sun Microsystems, 1996