We all have visited the Library in real life. You must have seen the large number of books divided into various sections such as chemistry, accounts, history, biology, and whatnot. Even if someone visits the Library for the first time, he/she can easily find any books by referring to the different categories. Similarly is the case is with open-source libraries that are categorized into various topics and types. They consist of reusable code for building digital applications and solutions. The only difference is that these are available virtually on online platforms.
If you are looking for Java libraries, a simple search can help you find various libraries with tested code. These consist of ready-made frameworks based on various issues that programmers face in their routine work. You can easily take the code from the Library to use it. It saves a lot of time for the developer to write the complete code from scratch. Just like shelves in a Library, the information is divided into the “packages’ such as java.io, java.net, java.applet, java.lang, etc. So, here in this blog, we will explore Open Source Java Libraries and their types.
Overview
With the rapid growth in the IT Industry, Java development has become one of the best career options today. Java is a powerful language used in computer games, web applications, and mobile applications. Some of the merits of Java are:
- Seamless processing
- Write code once, execute anywhere
- Reusable code and object-oriented language
- Easy to understand, compile, run, and debug
The features mentioned above make Java a widely used programming language among others. As per the statistics of GitHub, around 9 million users across the world prefer Java as the most suitable programming language. Java developers needed to collaborate with fellow web developers and software professionals to make app code for Java design, application, implementation, execution, and finally test existing Java code and application, along with brainstorming for a better design idea for the applications and software.
Top Useful Open-source Libraries
Here in this section, let’s explore Java Libraries that can assist you in performing various tasks. However, in order to use these libraries, developers must be familiar with Java code.
Logging Libraries
Logging Libraries are the most common types of Java libraries, as they are required in almost every project. These libraries are the most crucial for the server-side application, as the logs are the places where you can monitor what’s going on in the application. However, some better alternatives, such as SLF4j, LogBack, and Log4j with their logging library, are available. The programmer should be familiar with the merits and demerits of the logging library.
JSON Parsing libraries
In the era of IoT and web services, JSON has become the go-to protocol to carry the data from the customer to the server. JSON has replaced it as the most suitable way to transfer data. However, JDK does not have the JSON library, but plenty of third-party libraries are available that enable the user to both create and parse JSON messages, such as Gson and Jackson. To use these, the developer must be familiar with at least these libraries.
Jackson is a widely used JSON parsing library famous for its accuracy, high performance, and lightweight. It allows the developers to make and serialize Java objects to JSON or reverse. Jackson has different tools and approaches for working with JSON, like using data annotation on additional data format modules, POJO classes, etc. It supports various data standard collections, Hibernates, Java 8 module, data types, etc., and can process the encrypted data in TOML, XML, BSV, CBOR, BSON etc.
General Purpose Libraries
There are various excellent, general-purpose 3rd party libraries available to developers, such as Google Guava and Apache Commons. These libraries simply do various tasks.
Mockito
Mockito is an open-source mocking framework. The role of Java developers is to conduct unit tests at various times. Mockito assists the developers in writing tests with a simple and clean API. It allows developers to test dummy objects and double objects for test-driven and behavior-driven development. As per the research of StackOverflow, it is the most-voted mocking framework for Java.
Database Connection Pool Library (DBCP)
Software development is infrequently limited to a single platform or language. Java developers integrate databases into Java applications. However, the database connection libraries make such interactions faster to process. It enables programmers to pool the connection instead of creating an individual Database connection with every user, saving valuable effort and time. However, Apache DBCP 2 is the updated version of DBCO1 and has improved performance.
Conclusion
As the categories are non-exhaustive, you can find Open Source Java Libraries to use in your existing program to perform different functions. The most crucial thing you must be aware of is the basic use of the library before moving on to more complex libraries. You can use the alternative libraries to explore the same function to learn and compare with each other.
