Write an application that inputs an integer code for a character and displays the corresponding character. Modify this application so that it generates all possible three-digit codes in the range from 000 to 255 and attempts to print the corresponding characters.

In the dawn of computing, the need for a standard way to represent text became apparent, leading to the advent of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). ASCII is a character encoding standard for electronic communication; it encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers.

ASCII includes a mix of printable characters such as uppercase and lowercase letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and control characters designed to control how text is processed. For instance, the ASCII code for uppercase 'A' is 65, and for lowercase 'a' it is 97. Control characters, ranging from 0-31, are non-printable and manage text flow when processed by a computer.

When writing a Java program to map integers to corresponding ASCII characters, one should be aware that only codes from 0 to 127 are originally defined by ASCII. The extended ASCII characters range from 128 to 255, which include a variety of symbols and characters specific to different languages and purposes.

While ASCII has been incredibly influential, it couldn't cater to all the world's languages. This limitation gave rise to the Unicode system, a comprehensive effort to encode all characters from the world's writing systems, along with technical symbols, historical scripts, and more.

The Unicode Consortium, established in 1991, aimed to replace existing character encoding schemes with this new standard which provides a unique code point for every character, regardless of the platform, program, or language. Unicode encodes characters in different formats, like UTF-8, UTF-16, and others, with UTF-8 being the most widely used on the web.

UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII, meaning the first 128 Unicode characters are identical to ASCII, which is why understanding ASCII is still relevant. For characters beyond this range, UTF-8 uses a variable number of bytes to represent a character, enabling it to accommodate over a million distinct code points. This wide range makes Unicode essential for global software development and is critical while working with Java applications intended for an international audience.

Java is a popular, versatile programming language designed with the philosophy of 'Write Once, Run Anywhere' (WORA). This sophisticated language has extensive support for character encoding, making it an excellent choice for developers to create globalized applications.

In Java, the 'char' data type traditionally represents a single 16-bit Unicode character. Since Java supports Unicode from its initial versions, applications written in Java can adapt to different languages and regions without the need for major rewrites. For instance, a Java program that converts integer values to characters will, by default, refer to the Unicode character set.

To handle outputs for various encoded characters, Java provides mechanisms through its APIs, such as 'String' and 'Charset', which make it simple to encode or decode text from one character set to another. Notably, when dealing with character conversions, Java programmers must consider character encoding to ensure their applications behave consistently across different computing platforms and user locales.