One of many advantages of Java as a programming language is that Java has been here for more than 25 years, is widely adopted across multiple industries, and has a huge development community and ecosystem. This is great for Java developers, especially beginners, because there are so many tools, technologies, and solutions available in Java programming that make their work so much easier.
Today we are going to talk about third-party Java libraries, as having a strong and diverse selection of libraries is one of those things that make Java a go-to choice for so many companies and projects. Having libraries at their disposal allows developers to save a lot of time and money, which is a crucial factor for businesses, while also using well-structured code that is easy to maintain. From the programmer’s point of view, using libraries also has lots of benefits, as they make developer’s work easier and allow them to learn coding standards and best practices.
That’s why today a professional Java programmer needs to be well-familiar with at least some of the most popular and commonly used third-party Java libraries. Here are ten Java libraries that we can recommend you to learn as a Java developer.
JUnit is a very common and well-known open source unit testing framework for Java and the JVM. Part of a family of unit testing frameworks collectively known as xUnit. According to Oracle, JUnit is by far the most popular library among Java developers.
Apache Commons is a project of the Apache Software Foundation focused on creating reusable Java components for various purposes. Apache Commons has multiple different libraries for almost every need of Java developers. Apache Commons IO, which is a library of utilities to assist with developing IO functionality, is considered to be the most popular one in this set.
Google Guava is another wide set of core Java libraries from Google that includes new collection types (such as multimap and multiset), immutable collections, a graph library, and utilities for concurrency, I/O, hashing, caching, primitives, strings, and more. Guava is widely used on most Java projects within Google.
Known as "JSON for Java," Jackson is a popular library of data-processing tools for Java (and the JVM), including the flagship streaming JSON parser / generator library, matching data-binding library (POJOs to and from JSON), and additional data format modules to process data encoded in Avro, BSON, CBOR, CSV, Smile, (Java) Properties, Protobuf, XML or YAML; and even the large set of data format modules to support data types of widely used data types such as Guava, Joda, PCollections and more.
SLF4J stands for the Simple Logging Facade for Java. It is used as a simple facade or abstraction for various logging frameworks (such as java.util.logging, logback, log4j) allowing the end-user to plug in the desired logging framework at deployment time.
Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) is a library that provides an API and tools to automate the mapping between XML documents and Java objects allowing you to access XML data without having to unmarshal it.
Apache Log4j is very old and common in the Java ecosystem logging framework. Apache Log4j 2 is a newer updated version of Log4j that provides significant improvements over its predecessor.
Apache HttpComponents is a toolset of low-level Java components focused on HTTP and associated protocols. Designed for extension while providing robust support for the base HTTP protocol, HttpComponents library may be of interest to anyone building HTTP-aware client and server applications such as web browsers, web spiders, HTTP proxies, web service transport libraries, or systems that leverage or extend the HTTP protocol for distributed communication.
That’s why today a professional Java programmer needs to be well-familiar with at least some of the most popular and commonly used third-party Java libraries. Here are ten Java libraries that we can recommend you to learn as a Java developer.
