Java was developed in 1991 at Sun Microsystems by James Gosling and others to be a platform-independent object-oriented programming language. It was initially called Oak but renamed to Java in 1995. Java compiles code to bytecode that runs on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) allowing programs to run on any device with a JVM. Major features of Java include being object-oriented, portable, robust, secure, multithreaded, and dynamic. Java has evolved through several versions and is widely used for internet applications and enterprise software.