A Short History of Java and How It's Hosted Today Java has been declared “dead” more times than most programming languages ever get to live. And yet, here it is. Still running banks. Still powering enterprise systems. Still quietly doing the work no one tweets about. So how did Java get here? And just as importantly, how has Java been hosted over the years as the internet itself evolved? If you really want to understand Java, you have to understand the environments it lives in. In this article we will explore A Short History of Java and How It's Hosted Today. Why Java Mattered So Much in the Early Internet In the mid-1990s, the web was messy. Operating systems didn’t agree with each other. Browsers behaved differently.