Top 8 Java People You Should Know

Here are the top 8 Java people, they’re created frameworks, products, tools or books that contributed to the Java community, and changed the way of coding Java.

P.S The order is based on my personal priority.

8. Tomcat & Ant Founder

James-Duncan-Davidson

James Duncan Davidson, while he was software engineer at Sun Microsystems (1997–2001), created Tomcat Java-based web server, still widely use in most of the Java web projects, and also Ant build tool, which uses XML to describe the build process and its dependencies, which is still the de facto standard for building Java-based Web applications.

Related Links

  1. James Duncan Davidson Twitter
  2. James Duncan Davidson Wiki
  3. James Duncan Davidson personal blog
  4. Apache Ant
  5. Apache Tomcat

7. Test Driven Development & JUnit Founder

Kent-Beck

Kent Beck, creator of the Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development software development methodologies. Furthermore, he and Erich Gamma created JUnit, a simple testing framework, which turn into the de facto standard for testing Java-based Web applications. The combine of JUnit and Test Driven Development makes a big changed on the way of coding Java, which causes many Java developers are not willing to follow it.

Related Links

  1. Kent Beck Twitter
  2. Kent Beck Wiki
  3. Kent Beck Blog
  4. JUnit Testing Framework
  5. Extreme Programming Wiki
  6. Test Driven Development Wiki

News & Interviews

  1. Kent Beck: “We thought we were just programming on an airplane”
  2. Interview with Kent Beck and Martin Fowler
  3. eXtreme Programming An interview with Kent Beck

Kent Beck Books

  1. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (2nd Edition)
  2. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
  3. JUnit Pocket Guide

6. Java Collections Framework

Joshua-Bloch

Joshua Bloch, led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including JDK 5.0 language enhancements and the award-winning Java Collections Framework. In June 2004 he left Sun and became Chief Java Architect at Google. Furthermore, he won the prestigious Jolt Award from Software Development Magazine for his book, “Effective Java”, which is arguably a must read Java’s book.

Related Links

  1. Joshua Bloch Twitter
  2. Joshua Bloch Wiki

News & Interviews

  1. Effective Java: An Interview with Joshua Bloch
  2. Rock Star Josh Bloch

Joshua Bloch Books

  1. Effective Java (2nd Edition)
  2. Java Concurrency in Practice

5. JBoss Founder

Marc-Fleury

Marc Fleury, who founded JBoss in 2001, an open-source Java application server, arguably the de facto standard for deploying Java-based Web applications. Later he sold the JBoss to RedHat, and joined RedHat to continue support on the JBoss development. On 9 February 2007, he decided to leave Red Hat to pursue other personal interests, such as teaching, research in biology, music and his family.

Related Links

  1. Marc Fleury Wiki
  2. Marc Fleury Blog
  3. JBoss Application Server

News & Interviews

  1. Could Red Hat lose JBoss founder?
  2. JBoss founder Marc Fleury leaves Red Hat, now what?
  3. JBoss’s Marc Fleury on SOA, ESB and OSS
  4. Resurrecting Marc Fleury

4. Struts Founder

Craig-McClanahan

Craig Mcclanahan, creator of Struts, a popular open source MVC framework for building Java-based web applications, which is arguably that every Java developer know how to code Struts. With the huge success of Struts in early day, it’s widely implemented in every single of the old Java web application project.

Related Links

  1. Craig Mcclanahan Wiki
  2. Craig Mcclanahan Blog
  3. Apache Struts

News & Interviews

  1. Interview with Craig McClanahan
  2. Struts Or JSF?

3. Spring Founder

Rod-Johnson

Rod Johnson, is the founder of the Spring Framework, an open source application framework for Java, Creator of Spring, CEO at SpringSource. Furthermore, Rod’s best-selling Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (2002) was one of the most influential books ever published on J2EE.

Related Links

  1. Rod Johnson Twitter
  2. Rod Johnson Blog
  3. SpringSource
  4. Spring Framework Wiki

News & Interviews

  1. VMware.com : VMware to acquire SpringSource
  2. Rod Johnson : VMware to acquire SpringSource
  3. Interview with Rod Johnson – CEO – Interface21
  4. Q&A with Rod Johnson over Spring’s maintenance policy changes
  5. Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development: Interview with Rod Johnson

Rod Johnson Books

  1. Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (Programmer to Programmer)
  2. Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB

2. Hibernate Founder

gravin-king

Gavin King, is the founder of the Hibernate project, a popular object/relational persistence solution for Java, and the creator of Seam, an application framework for Java EE 5. Furthermore, he contributed heavily to the design of EJB 3.0 and JPA.

Related Links

  1. Gavin King Blog
  2. Hibernate Wiki
  3. Hibernate Framework
  4. JBoss seam

News & Interviews

  1. Tech Chat: Gavin King on Contexts and Dependency Injection, Weld, Java EE 6
  2. JPT : The Interview: Gavin King, Hibernate
  3. JavaFree : Interview with Gavin King, founder of Hibernate
  4. Seam in Depth with Gavin King

Gavin King Books

  1. Java Persistence with Hibernate
  2. Hibernate in Action (In Action series)

1. Father of the Java programming language

James-Gosling

James Gosling, generally credited as the inventor of the Java programming language in 1994. He created the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. For this achievement he was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. On April 2, 2010, he left Sun Microsystems which had recently been acquired by the Oracle Corporation. Regarding why he left, Gosling wrote on his blog that “Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.”

Related Links

  1. James Gosling Blog
  2. James Gosling Wiki

News & Interviews

  1. Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling
  2. Interview: James Gosling, ‘the Father of Java’
  3. Developer Interview: James Gosling
Note
Please feel free to share your personal opinion.

118 comments on “Top 8 Java People You Should Know

  1. Have you been thinking about the power sources and the tiles whom use blocks I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoyed every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out the new stuff you post

    Reply
  2. Those guidelines additionally worked to become a good way to recognize that other people online have the identical fervor like mine to grasp great deal more around this condition.

    Reply
  3. Men of extraordinary ability. Thanks for listing them and their credits.

    Reply
    1. OMG… because they happen to be the strongest contributors to the Java language and architecture. A desire to see anyone-but-white-men in a list of anything does not make you “progressive”. It makes you a racist and a sexist. But if you REALLY want to talk about key female contributors, for example, to computer science, I refer you to Adm (deceased) Grace Hopper, USN, inventor of the first compiler, and Lady Ada Lovelace, inventor of modern computer programming as an endeavor.

      Sorry of it disappoints you that *gasp* they BOTH happen to be Caucasians, but that’s just how it goes.

      Reply
  4. hattest comment i have ever seen … just try to say something in language which is not your mother language … it will biggest shit …

    Reply
  5. Because to learn Java , u good have to be good in English but how deep u can think.

    Reply
    1. Step 1: Go for an interview and hope you get the job.
      Step 2: Work for few years in some company and learn something useful.
      Step 3: Finally you’ll get experience certificate when you’re leaving the company.

      Hope your doubt is cleared.

      Reply
  6. aaaahhh……got butt hurt by youre job getting outsourced?

    Reply
  7. Great list ! As Steve Jobs has said : “Innovation is what separates leaders
    from followers.” appdynamics vs new relic

    Reply
    1. ridiculous comment……you can run java on any VM…thats point one in java…PLATFORM INDEPENDANT

      Reply
  8. Mr. English Did any asked you like “share what you think about the indian people”. Looks like you are one heck of self ego wor-shipper. If you didn’t like his English you could have mentioned in a positive way, and what do you mean by your jobs still goes to these people. Dude! Indian developers work more expect less. That’s what you don’t get to see in every programmer. You should be proud your jobs are going to indian people.

    Reply
  9. What for you are on this site…to read the post and make contextual, healthy comments or to comment on English of other people ? English is just another language in the world…it is the greatness of Indians that we welcome other languages… we in India have enough native languages…for your kind information.

    Learn some ethics first…

    — Proud to be an Indian

    Reply
  10. I respect the professionals for creating new programming languages useful for applications in every field of life in computer environments

    Reply
  11. And what baffles me even more is the fact that you think proper English is a prerequisite for the jobs you are referring to.And also, English is not the mother tongue of most Indian people.

    Reply
    1. Sahi kaha Ankur Bhai..

      In logo ko sirf bolna aur bhokna aaa hai..

      Cheers..

      Reply
    2. Sorry but adequate English IS a prerequisite to work for American companies. How can you communicate requirements, issues and day to day tasks without adequate English?!?!

      Reply
  12. people who has a gift of knowledge by god making thing from worst case to simple way….here these people tried hard to give a simple way to do things….

    Reply
  13. Why i use spring? means can you provide some bunch of simple advantage of spring

    Reply
    1. try using struts and have a look at how horrible the framework is…….read the book “Spring in Action”, have a look at some of the spring/springmvc codebases on github…….spring is so much more fluent, plus it has integration with most other J2EE frameworks

      Reply
  14. I want to know how to get an JComboBox to auto suggest the elements when we type in the combo box. For an example, If I had loaded a JComboBox with these names using MySQL, [Amila, Nimila, Nikila, Sunil] and when I type “N” inside the Combo Box, it’ll drop down the list only showing Nimila & Nikila as suggestions. And I’m trying to do this on NetBeans. Thanks.

    Reply
  15. its always easiest to critique after the work has been done… but if it were up to me… why only 8? there could easily be a top 10 or 20…

    Bill Pugh – led jsr 133 – rewrote the JMM. A java god in today’s financial java world.
    Bill Joy – Can’t talk about Gosling without him.
    Doug Lea – led jsr 166. java would be in the abyss today without it.
    Gilad Bracha – same as Bill Joy. These guys architected the JLS with Gosling.

    of course these guys all had help from brilliant minds among/beneath them.
    Jeremy Manson would certainly be an honorable mention perhaps, as he seems to bridge the gap with today’s up and coming in the multithreaded world.

    Reply
  16. I had some months ago an interview in a company, which has just been bought by a bigger company. On the day of interview I could exchange talk with some people, and I really felt them “emotionnaly” and “historicaly” unsatisfied that another company bought their company. we’re humans and sometimes we confuse business and memories 😀 . Ok I remembered this when I read about our Father, the Father of the Java programming language. I want to meeeeet him T_T

    Reply
  17. Great Guys, Lets hope the JAVA Technology rule the World

    Reply
  18. I believe we could have included Doug Lea as well; his contribution is immense when it comes to java.

    Reply
  19. Really i am impressed. Thanx for motivating me more.. Now it might help me to become a programmer too :p

    Reply
  20. hello sir

    i have complete my be computer engineering in 2013. now i want to do job in android/java.
    so you are help me? for job and increment my knowledge.

    Reply
    1. be is abbreviation for Bachelor of Engineering (BE) – for someone who might not know,

      Reply
  21. i have a problem in my final semester project that i make in java language.. is some one help me to solve that problem

    Reply
    1. MkYong is “Mister Perfectionist” of Java Development…!!! he knows all Spring MVC, Hibernate, Struts, Ant, Maven, Android, GAE, JSF, Web Services, xml, JDBC…………etc. I also think he should be number 1.

      Reply
    2. May be because he didn’t invented anything. The day he’ll invent anything, we will see him on list. 🙂

      Reply
    3. You guys are talking about M.K. Young, i wonder why Chuck Norris didn’t figure at this list as 0 ? (Maybe just because life is not fair).

      Reply
  22. don’t know how these guys think ed of creating such things,simply brilliant.Thanks

    Reply
  23. Thank you to all the language developer legends

    Reply
  24. What’s up i am kavin, its my first time to commenting anywhere, when i read this post i thought i could also make comment due to this brilliant article.

    Reply
  25. yes indeed , anyone related to software world must know this names , but i am suggesting to add more : such as Ritchi

    Reply
  26. Thanks a lot for your conclusion, mkyong. 🙂

    Reply
    1. hey “Jenkins Continuous Integration”, plz correct your sentence.
      we say JAVA MAN’S

      Reply
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    Reply
  28. Mkyong,
    Its all very nice collection of tutorial, Thanks for sharing the valuable information.

    Reply
  29. Thanks $author! You share some great -2 tactics, thanks for sharing all this and making itclear,enough for any one to be able to get! I’ve subscribed to your rss feed to keep up to date,looking forward to your new post!

    Reply
  30. Mostly close to what all we think except Hibernate’s Gavin King. No doubt he is very good developer but wasted not only his time but other people time by inventing and then maintaining Hibernate for such long time. There is nothing wrong in inventing wrong thing. Failure is part of game. But what is important is that not realizing that we haven’t found the perfect solution yet!

    If he would have invested his time in inventing something simple he would have crossed stature of Rod Johnson or Joshua Bloch. Hibernate and few other softwares (including EJB, JPA where Gavin has given his input as well) are curse but people still haven’t realized it yet. EJB 2.0 would have given the same pain if Rod didn’t have invented Spring. I guarantee you that if Spring would not have been there they (Sun guyz) would not have taken effort to create EJB 3.0. We all would be using same old EJB 2.0 and same ugly entity beans.

    The same invention is yet to happen in ORM world and that’s why people still use Hibernate. One great guy and one new invention and then everything changes in few months. Then they realize what shithead they were to use such ugly technology for such long time.

    Reply
    1. I really like Ken’s comment, I wonder why do you think these frameworks are not good? I am a new java programmer. Should I avoid learning these frameworks? What are the alternatives?
      Kevin.

      Reply
    2. na dude, hibernate 3.0 is good….atleast with all the annotations and stuff….JBoss is doing a good job maintaining the project

      Reply
  31. Java Concurrency will allow java to rule the server side …
    Also it is a structural approach to concurrency
    So I think Doug Lea could at least be mentioned like the Collection framework conceptor 🙂

    My 2cts

    Reply
  32. I think Joshua Bloch should be at #2,…By the way really good article

    P.S The order is based on my personal priority.

    Reply
  33. 2 guys here that real creators of java, rest of them just creator some frameworks or tools
    that two guys:
    James Gosling
    Joshua Bloch

    I think rest of them can not come near to them.

    Reply
  34. All of these all of them are of top Java people. But there are only 3 legends:
    1- James Gosling.
    2- Neal Gafter
    3-Joshua Bloch

    Reply
    1. Gafter *not a legend* unless you think se4 was awesome and you’re a MS fan.

      I’m just trolling. Gafter was hugely significant.

      Reply
  35. It’ll be great if you can say what they are doing right now. For example, where is Mr. Mcclanahan now and what’s he doing?

    Reply
  36. thank you for this information. i hope for java developers this kind of information is published even if in future also.

    Reply
  37. It really good to know about consummates of java&&j2ee.

    Reply
  38. I strong feel, a great name is missing from the list of great people.
    My favorite. Sir Martin Fowler.

    Reply
  39. Nice to see these great people who contributed the Java what we have today.. Its very motivating to know these people. I am still in the begging stage of learning this great language. Please guide me to be a great Java programmer. And you are also great man and i mean it >>! Thanks

    Reply
  40. A different kind of blog post but I like it . glad to know about these greats though I was familiar with most of them its good to get all links together, in my opinion James Gosling should be in 1st rather than 10 if you are talking about java.

    Reply
  41. thnks ....i was really not knowing ...except james sir
    Reply
  42. Is the order right? IMHO James Duncan Davidson deserves better spot than 8, and certainly before say Gavin or Kent.

    Reply
  43. Hi everybody,

    They are Top 8 Most wanted People in the world,
    Pls Find and kill them.
    ¯\_(?)_/¯

    Reply
  44. Gavin King – CDI !

    Also whoever invented maven should be held on the same grounds as whoever invented ant. Avoid these guys in all cases 😉

    Reply
  45. You are missing two people. One is Doug Lea (who wrote Java Concurrency Package) and a new rising star, kohsuke kawaguchi, Hudson inventor.

    Reply
    1. Thanks for the Doug Lea, i do not know he wrote the concurrency package. Hudson, a great CI… indeed need to be noted as well, will update the list soon…

      Reply
    1. ya, he is a great guy as well, “co-designed and implemented the Java language features in releases 1.4 through 5.0”.

      Reply
  46. Great list BUT :

    – ANT is not limited to building WEB applications
    – same thing for JUnit which is not limited to WEB applications testing
    – “award-winning Java Collections Framework” : are you sure the collection framework won awards ?
    – “[Struts is] widely implemented in every single of the old Java web application project” : this is wrong, I know many OLD java web applications which directly use JSP & servlets.
    – “James Gosling, generally credited as the inventor of the Java programming language” : “generally credited” ? Does this mean someone else claims to have invented the language ?

    Reply
    1. Hi, thanks for your suggestion,

      Q : Are you sure the collection framework won awards ?
      A : I didn’t attend the award ceremony, but it’s widely published in many articles, for example,
      http://java.sun.com/developer/Books/effectivejava/

      Q : This is wrong, I know many OLD java web applications which directly use JSP & servlets.
      Ya, indeed, some ancient projects are pure JSP & servlets, but the Struts is still the most implemented framework in the world.

      Q : Does this mean someone else claims to have invented the language ?
      A : At least the statement is widely acceptable in the world wide.

      Sometime, we have to accept the perfect imperfection.

      Reply

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