Introduction - If you have any usage issues, please Google them yourself
ICU was originally developed by the Taligent company. The Taligent team later became the Unicode group at the IBM® Globalization Center of Competency in Cupertino. The team has received significant input from the open source community worldwide.
Java™ classes developed at Taligent were incorporated into the Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.1 developed by Sun® Microsystems. The classes were then ported to C++ and later some classes were also ported to C. The classes provide internationalization utilities for writing global applications in C, C++, or Java programming languages.
ICU for Java (ICU4J) includes enhanced versions of some of these classes, plus additional classes that complement the classes in the JDK. C and C++ versions of the same international functionality are available in ICU for C (ICU4C). The APIs differ slightly due to language differences and new functionality. For example, ICU4C includes a character converter API.
ICU4J and ICU4C keep the same de