Gosling, along with Mike Sheridan and Patrick Naughton, initiated the 'Green Project' at Sun Microsystems. Their initial goal was to develop a platform for interactive television, but the concept quickly evolved to target embedded systems. The initial language, named 'Oak' (after an oak tree outside Gosling's office), was designed to be platform-independent and small.

The Green Team demonstrated their technology using a personal digital assistant called "Star7". The language was renamed 'Java' due to trademark issues with 'Oak'. The name 'Java' was chosen in a brainstorming session, inspired by the island of Java, known for its coffee.

Java was officially launched at the SunWorld conference. The language was presented as a platform-independent solution for creating interactive web content, leveraging the then-emerging World Wide Web. Its "Write Once, Run Anywhere" (WORA) philosophy was a major selling point.

Java gained widespread adoption, becoming a dominant language for enterprise applications, web development, mobile applications (particularly with Java ME), and embedded systems. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) played a crucial role in its portability and security.

Sun Microsystems announced that the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Java Development Kit (JDK) would be released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This move further fueled Java's growth and community involvement.