Top Java Libraries to Use for Java Software Development

Top Java Libraries to Use for Java Software Development

Java has completely changed the programming language landscape. As compared to other programming languages, Java has become highly popular because of its incredible capabilities. This has led to an increased demand for investing in a Java development company for a wide range of applications. Java has a feature-rich and massive Core library. While the Standard Java library is adequate and powerful, you will still need to use other Java libraries for software development. While Java holds a prominent place in the industry for 25 years and has vast, active community support, it has numerous mature and useful libraries available. Using the existing, mature and top Java libraries is a great way to solve common or reoccurring problems than reinventing the wheel.

Being a professional Java development company, we use top Java libraries for our Java development services and solutions. Here in this blog post, we have discussed the 15 best Java libraries useful for all Java developers. Take a look!

Top Java Libraries that are Useful for All Java Developers

1. RxJava

Reactive Extensions (ReactiveX) is one of the most popular software development paradigm to handle asynchronous and event-driven coding. RxJava library is an implementation of Java VM using Observables. This popular library extends the Observer Pattern to facilitate efficient event-driven programming by adding composable operators based on the sequence of events or data through a declarative way. It also covers minor complexities such as synchronization, thread-safety, threading, and concurrent data structure.This Java library is a must for reactive programming.

2. OkHttp

Since HTTP is the most widely used Application layer protocol, there exist several powerful Java-based HTTP client libraries. OkHttp is the simplest but powerful HTTP client library in the JVM. It comes with an easy and clean API to build an HTTP client in Java.

This robust Java library supports high-end features like response caching, GZIP shrink,Connection pooling, modern TLS features, etc.

3. Logging Libraries

Logging libraries are usually used in every Java project. They are very important for server-side applications as logs are placed in areas where you can view the activities on your application. While JDK has its own logging library, there are several other options available such as LogBack, Log4j, and SLF4j.

A Java development company or a developer should know about the benefits and drawbacks of the logging library and the reason why using SLF4j is better than plain Log4j.

4. JSON Parsing libraries

As we are living in the world of web services and the IoT (Internet of Things), JSON is the mostly used protocol to transmit information from the client to the server. The XML has been replaced by the JASON parsing libraries as the most desirable way to carry information in a platform-independent way.

JDK is not shipped with a JASON library. However, you can use third-party libraries that can help you to parse as well as create JSON messages like Gson and Jackson.

A Java developer should know any of these Java libraries. So, before you hire Java developers for your project make sure they are familiar with these libraries.

5. General Purpose Libraries

There exists a couple of useful, general-purpose Java libraries like Apache Commons and Google Guava that simplify several tasks. Apache Commons consists of 43 modular libraries that include domains like Math, Collections, Database, I/O Utilities, Caching, etc. It is very common in the industry and a nearly unofficial Java Standard library enhancement. This Java library is ideal for large, complex projects.

Just like Apache Commons, Google Guava is also modular and has numerous independent libraries.It covers a wide range of domains including string manipulation, collections, essential utilities, graph libraries, hashing, I/O utilities, etc. If compared to Apache Commons, Google Guava has a better software design. If there’s a need to build a common library or utility class, then you should consider looking into Google Guava libraries.

6. Caffeine

If your software is read-heavy, then caching is an effective way to enhance its data access performance. Caffeine is one of the best Java libraries available. It is known for its high-performance and almost optimal caching Java library. It provides a fluent caching API and some high-end features such as asynchronous refresh, asynchronous loading of entries, weak referenced keys, etc.

7. Metrics

When you hire Java developers for building an application and when it runs into production, you want to gain insights into your app’s vital components. There is a Dropwizard framework that provides the Metrics Java library to gain insights into your application and JVM’s KPIs such as pending jobs, the rate of events, service health check, etc. Metrics are also modular and provide modules for other frameworks or libraries.

8. Java Web Socket

Traditional client-server communications are unidirectional. Java WebSocket is a bi-directional communication protocol used for one TCP connection. This Java library is an essential WebSocket server-client implementation in the Java Web Application Development process. If you’re working with WebSocket, then you should try using this library.

9. Liquibase

As a Java development company or developer, we all know the value of version control, CI/CD of our code, and DevOps. Liquibase is one of the popular Java libraries that support version controlling, tracking, and deployment of SQL database changes in Java-based applications. If your SQL database keeps changing, this tool can significantly simplify and ease out your database migration process.

10. Swagger-Core

OpenAPI is required for machine-readable interface files for describing, consuming, producing, and visualizing RESTful web services. One of the best Java implementations of the OpenAPI requirement is Swagger-Core. It can automatically produce REST API documentation for vanilla Java or Java EE application.

11. Joda Time

The pre-Java8 core library lacked data and time functionalities. Java8 introduced advanced data and time functionalities in its java.time package. If you’re still using the older version of Java, i.e. pre Java8, then you can use the Joda Time for advanced data and time functionalities. However, if you’re working with a new Java version, you may not need it.

12. MapStruct

In Java software development, one type of POJO is often converted into another type of POJO. The traditional way of achieving this POJO or Bean conversion is to code the transformation explicitly, which is a very tedious process. Java developers can do this smartly by using a Java library that is exclusively developed for this purpose. MapStruct library is a code generator that does mapping between POJO/Bean based on a convention over configuration methodology. The mapping code generated through this tool employs plain method invocations and therefore is quick, type-safe, and understandable.

13. JAXB

XML is a prevalent data format that provides stringent validation, storage, and transmission of data. Until the Java 8 version, the Java Standard library supports XML and data binding. However, with the release of Java 9, the Java Standard library no longer supports the XML processing functionalities and has been a move to a separate Java library called JAXB.

JAXB provides everything needed to work with XML in Java. It supports all W3C XML Schema features and validation. It offers an efficient and standard way of mapping between the XML and Java Code. It also comes with annotation-based Java-to-XML data binding.

14. Mockito

As a Java development company, we perform Unit/Integration testing as it is a vital part of the software development process. Often developers want to test a single Class (SUT), however, it depends on other hefty classes or external functionalities like I/O operations, database operations, etc. Mocking is one of the effective ways to write the Unit/Integration test in such cases. It allows developers to mock the behavior of the external Service calls and focus only on the Class that needs to be tested.

Mockito is the most popular and widely used mocking Java library. This library is ideal for testing a simple, large, or complex Enterprise Java project. Moreover, Mockito provides a very clean and simple API and keeps the Unit/Integration tests neat and clean.

15. JIB

When you hire Java developers for enterprise-level Java application development, you must make sure that the product developed is cloud-ready. To make your application ready for the cloud environment, developers need to first containerize the application, that is, placing the artifactory binary into Docker image.Dockerizing Java software is a daunting process as you need to have in-depth knowledge of Docker. You will also have to create a Dockerfile and require Docker Daemon.

The good news for a Java development company or developer is that Google has created an open-source Java containerizerby making use of already existing tools.JIB is one of the most useful Java libraries that can be used to create a well-optimized Docker and OCI image.

Wrapping Up

In this article, we have listed the best Java libraries that can facilitate your software development process by taking advantage of the common tasks to the tested libraries. Other than these Java libraries, there are several other Java libraries that help in developing software for Enterprises, Android Apps, Robotics, or Personal projects.

If you’re planning to build an enterprise application using Java, then you can hire Java developers from us. As a leading Java development company, we are here to address all your software development needs leveraging the power of Java.

FAQs

Q.1. Are there any PDF libraries for Java?

Ans.If you need to integrate PDF functionality in your Java application, like exporting data in PDF files, you may use iText and Apache FOP libraries.

Q.2. What is the standard library for Java?

Ans. The standard library for Java isScala Native 0.3.9 documentation.

Q.3. What are core Java libraries?

Ans.The core Java libraries contain classes that are used by numerous portions of the JDK. They have functionalities that are close to the VM and are not included explicitly in other areas like security.