Java was originated at Sun Microsystems in 1991 and was conceived by James Gosling and Patrick Naughton. It is an object-oriented programming language that is designed to be simple, secure, robust, portable, distributed, and multithreaded. Java uses object-oriented programming features like abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. It is compiled to bytecode that runs on a Java virtual machine, making programs portable across platforms.