During the early 90’s, there was something that was brewing on an oak tree, and that was nothing, but the beginning of an era of a programming language called Java.

James Gosling, otherwise known as the father of Java language created the Java in June 1991 for use in one of his many set top box projects. And by the end of 90’s, during 1997 Sun Microsystems officially held the copyrights for the language.

“By merely inventing something does it really mean that it is the best in the world at using it”? Infact, it is a million dollar question recently posted by Rick Ross in his blog.

It is one of the usual suspects that Sun, IBM, and Oracle, could be the leading companies to top the charts for the best companies in the world at Java.

IMHO SpringSource, the Apache Foundation and JBoss on one hand brought Java to the next level in open source, and on the other hand, Bea Systems and Jetbrains took Java towards commercial sucess. Mostly it is SpringSource that changed defined how J2EE should be with the Spring framework and it’s the principal part of Java for the enterprise development.

Considering all this, it is indeed difficult to define the best company for java in the world today. It is difficult to brand the company to be the best for initiating the language and then ignoring the contribution made by those companies, which made the programming simpler with their architecture, and made it much more enjoyable for the developers.