Java is a high-level, versatile, and object-oriented programming language that was created by James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems (now owned by Oracle) in the mid-1990s.It was designed with the goal of being platform-independent, allowing developers to write code that can run on any system with a compatible Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that revolves around the concept of "objects" - self-contained units that combine data (attributes) and behavior (methods) into a single entity. OOP promotes modular, organized, and reusable code by encapsulating data and methods together.