The followingoutline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Java:

Java is ageneral-purpose,concurrent,object-oriented,class-based,strong, andstatically typedprogramming language that is compiled toJava bytecode for execution on aJava Virtual Machine (JVM), where you canwrite once and run anywhere. Java was designed byJames Gosling and a team atSun Microsystems in the early 1990s and was a core component of Sun'sJava platform.^[1][2][3]

• Programming language — artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer.
• Object-oriented programming — built primarily around objects and classes.
• Class-based language — types and code are organized into classes.
• Compiled language — source code is compiled to an intermediate form (Java bytecode).
• Interpreted language —bytecode is executed by aJava virtual machine, which typically performsjust-in-time.
• General-purpose programming language — designed for a wide variety of application domains.
• Statically typed —type checking is performed at compile-time.
• Strongly typed language — enforces strict type rules at compile time.
• Concurrent language — built-in support for multithreading andconcurrency utilities.^[4]

• Oak — early name for a new programming language started atSun Microsystems^[5]
• Acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation in 2010, along with the Java programming language and APIs.
• Oracle litigation against Google's Android OS for using Java APIs from Oracle.See also:Comparison of Java and Android API
• Java 25 — latest major release published September 16, 2025^[6]

See also:Java Language fundamentals on Wikibooks andJava syntax

• Abstraction from hardware — students miss low-level cost models
• Array limitations — capped size and no truemultidimensional arrays
• Checked exceptions — criticized as verbose and largely abandoned by other languages
• Floating-point limitations — incompleteIEEE 754 support
• Generics via type erasure — limits expressiveness and caused unsoundness bugs
• Java performance — early implementations were slow compared to C/C++
• Primitive vs. object divide — forces code duplication in libraries
• Serialization — widely seen as a serious security risk
• Lack of tuples — requires awkward workarounds or third-party libraries
• Licensing and governance controversies —Sun Microsystems acquisition byOracle and subsequent litigation
• No operator overloading — makes math-heavy code less readable
• Potential sources of security vulnerabilities in Java applications
• Project Valhalla (missing value types) — inefficiency due to everything being objects
• Security vulnerabilities — repeated sandbox escapes and exploit waves
• Unsigned integer types — problematic forcryptography andC interop
• Weak parallelism — monitors criticized as insecure and unreliable^[13][14]

• Java SE — Java Platform Standard Edition
• Jakarta EE (formerly Java EE) — Enterprise Edition APIs and runtime for multi-tiered server applications^[15]
• JavaFX
• Java ME — Micro Edition for constrained devices and embedded systems

• List of Java software and tools
• List of Java frameworks
• List of Java libraries
• List of Java compilers
• Comparison of Java virtual machines andList of Java virtual machines
• List of JVM languages
• List of application servers for Java
• List of unit testing frameworks for Java
• Comparison of IDEs for Java

• Android (operating system)
• Apache Hadoop
• Apache Tomcat
• Eclipse IDE
• Elasticsearch
• IntelliJ IDEA
• Jenkins
• Minecraft (Java Edition)
• NetBeans

• Apache Software Foundation —Apache Commons,Apache Maven,Apache Tomcat,Apache Kafka
• Eclipse Foundation —Adoptium,Eclipse IDE,Jakarta EE,Eclipse Jetty,Eclipse Vert.x
• OpenJDK community —Java Platform Standard Edition
• Oracle —GraalVM (Community Edition),JavaFX (OpenJFX)
• Red Hat /JBoss —Hibernate,Drools,Quarkus

• Articles with example Java code

• Bruce Eckel –Thinking in Java
• James Gosling –The Java Programming Language
• Joshua Bloch –Effective Java
• Kathy Sierra –Head First Java
• Herbert Schildt –Java: The Complete Reference,Java: A Beginner's Guide,Java 2 Programmer's Reference

• Arthur van Hoff
• Bill Joy
• Craig L. Russell
• Doug Lea
• Gilad Bracha
• Guy L. Steele Jr.
• James Gosling
• Joshua Bloch
• Martin Odersky
• Urs Hölzle

• Clojure —Lisp dialect for the JVM
• Groovy
• JRuby – Ruby implementation for the JVM
• Jython — Python implementation for the JVM
• Kotlin — JVM language fromJetBrains
• Scala — JVM language combiningOOP andfunctional paradigms^[16]

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of:Java Programming

• Java Community Process
• Java version history
• Outline of computer programming
• Outline of software
• Outline of software engineering
• List of Kotlin software and tools
• List of programmers

Outlines of other programming languages

• Outline of the C programming language
• Outline of the C sharp programming language
• Outline of the C++ programming language
• Outline of the JavaScript programming language
• Outline of the Perl programming language
• Outline of the Python programming language
• Outline of the Rust programming language

• Oracle — Java
• OpenJDK — reference implementation and community
• Java.com — runtime download and general info

• Java (programming language)
• Outlines
• Java platform
• JVM programming languages
• Object-oriented programming languages
• Concurrent programming languages
• Statically typed programming languages
• Class-based programming languages
• Programming language comparisons
• Outlines of computing and engineering

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata