The name Kawa comes from the Polish word for coffee; a play on words, since Java is another familiar name for coffee.

Kawa is notable as one of the few programming languages with support for units of measure in the form of quantities.

Besides using the language Scheme, Java object fields and methods can be accessed using code such as: (invoke object 'method argument ...).

Static (class) methods can be invoked with the function invoke-static.

Kawa can be extended with Java code (by creating scheme functions in Java), and combined with other JVM implementations.