Simon Phipps, Sun’s chief technology evangelist, likens Java to a baby duck. “When Java technology was born, it looked around, saw a Web browser and thought it was an applet,” he jokes. His point: ...

There was a time, back in the mid-1990s, when a little language called Oak was being developed by Sun. I recall bumping into it as I surfed the Web one day. It looked interesting, but I wondered why ...