One of the best way to learn any technology is to follow the best minds. Here I have collected the set of authors & their blogs who have made(and making) huge contribution to the Java.
It's interesting to see their activities in coming days
James Gosling - Father of Java
Rod Johnson - Author of Spring Framework. Finally, provided promising solution to the lunacy of EJB that triggered new EJB3/Java EE to evolve. It looks like now Rod wants to be actively part of next javaEE spec.
Gavin King - Father of Hibernate. Saved lot of time of writing and maintaining hand written SQL in java & telling world that transparent persistence a good thing & is huge advantage, which some reason TopLink/entity beans failed confirm
Clinton Begin & his team - Creators of superb SQL Data mapper framework iBatis - Making working SQL easy even for legacy DBMS where selling 'hibernate' to paranoid DBAs is a difficult task. It has also influenced JDBC4 to evolve.
Bruno Lowagie - Author of iText (iText is an open source Java library for PDF generation and manipulation & regarded as one of the best library)
Gregor Kiczales - AspectJ Author, Showing cross cutting concerns could be handled in a intelligent/non intrusive way.
Ceki - Log4j. The de-facto standard for Java Logging.
Doug Cutting - Lucene. Developed the de-facto full-text search engine for Java.
James Duncan Davidson - Ant and Tomcat.
Joe Walnes - XStream and SiteMesh. Top class framework for handling XML & web templates.
OpenSymphony -Copmany behind great frameworks like SiteMesh, Quartz, Webwork, Xwork
Erik Thauvin - Java pointers - A Java Crawler Great Collection of links, although he has stopped now adding anymore links citing the time it takes to come up with valid links, but still it's good to visit his old collections. I am planning to start this again in 2008
Java Swing isn't that bad because of these guys
Eugene Belyaev - Creator of IntelliJ IDEA. #1 IDE using just Swing.
Karsten Lentzsch - JGoodies. Superb contribution to java swing
Doug Lea - util.concurrent. Superb framework for parallel stuff. More important in Swing than anything else.
Romain Guy with amazing swing skills. Author of Filthy Rich clients
Ethan Nicholas Author of Yahoo SiteBuilder
Chet Haase - Co-Author of Filthy Rich clients
Jfreecharts - I was not able get the author details of this excellent framework
Gurus - Although they have not made any significant contributions to Java, but they have definitely has huge impact on the way software is created.
Martin Fowler - Probably the best writer who can be called as true technical Guru with amazing writing skills. Defining patterns samples...
Erich Gamma - JUnit, Design Patterns and Eclipse
Jack Shirazi - Java Performance. created website on performance tuning
Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck - Extreme Programming.
http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/people/ - The list of language creators
