Well, yes and no. I'm old enough to remember when Java was launched, and I was getting paid to write Java in '96. At the time it was going to be a whole new way to write software - modular software made of components downloaded on the fly whenever you needed them. That is why package names work like that , com.sun.java.blah meant a class called Blah that you would grab from the server java.sun.com when you first instantiated it. Of course it didn't work out like that, it was only in the late 90s that Java morphed into a corporate back-end language. You can pinpoint when this happened when they rushed out the JDBC spec.
I was at that birthing as well....and had the joy of using CORBA, I can see my copy of The CORBA Reference Guide by Alan Pope sitting in the "candidates for landfill" area of my bookshelf.
Don't get me wrong, the guys at Sun were quality geeks, and they never set out to create the Corporate Back End Language of record. But that's how it gained its huge head of steam.
Another reason I failed to mention that Java is in decline is that the geek / utility-driven folks at Sun had essentially said "Java is a mature language now" and were focusing on other languages for the platform. Then the sales and marketing people at Oracle got involved and realized that was not the best way to bilk their existing customers.
