= The Ultimate Java Developer Library, Tool & People List

Marco Behler
2014-12-27
:date: December 27, 2014
:page-layout: layout-guides
:page-icon: business_bulb-63
:page-published: false
:page-tags: ["java libraries"]

Java developers are flooded with a plethora of libraries and tools for their day-
to-day work. We compiled a little list of stuff that we use everyday in primarily
business line development (CRM, banking, web dev etc.) and that we can
wholeheartedly recommend. There’s also a very opinionated section of people that
we’d like to give some props to, if you are not on it, give us a shout ;)

Please feel free to comment or post your own personal suggestions. Our personal New
Year’s wish, though: Please link to this page when referencing this list and do not
reproduce it in its entirety. Props go out to https://www.hanselman.com/[Scott
Hanselman] for „inspiring“ this list.

Happy new year!

== Backend

* https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP[HikariCP] A topic that you probably

never think about, but HikariCP is now the connection pool on the JVM. Stop
fighting with DBCP and other options and trust the website when it says: nothing is
faster, nothing is more correct ;)

* https://www.jooq.org/[Jooq] A fresh outlook on Java persistence, especially if

you are fed up with heavier ORM choices and are not afraid, but in love with SQL.

* https://hibernate.org/orm/[Hibernate] Chances are that you will encounter

Hibernate sooner or later in a project and even though development has somewhat
stalled, and there’s a lot of criticism of ORM in general, it is still a good
library if used correctly.

* https://dropwizard.io/[Dropwizard] Want to get your REST services up and running

in no time, with a nice little stack of Java libraries behind? Give Dropwizard a
try.

* https://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/[Spring-Boot] Similarily, if you find

yourself having to create new Spring projects over and over, try Spring-Boot, as it
will considerably cut down your ramp-up time.

* https://projects.spring.io/spring-batch/[Spring-Batch] Batch jobs are not the

sexiest programmes in the world, but if you have to write them, Spring-Batch is a
viable option.

* https://spring.io/projects[Spring] Yep, there’s a lot of cruft, especially in the

„lesser-known“ spring projects, but if you want to get a quick bang for your buck
and simply be able to re-use a lot of stuff then you won’t get around Spring.

* https://logback.qos.ch/[Logback] We love Ceki and all the work he has put into
Logback and logging over the years. Logback is stable and mature and a good choice
for logging.

* https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/[Log4j2] And now there’s also log4j2, which

is also a reasonable choice for logging stuff. Please do not get sucked into a
religious war and insanely non-actionable log framework-comparisons.

* https://resteasy.jboss.org/[Resteasy] Another good choice for building RESTful

Java applications.

* https://square.github.io/dagger/[Dagger] Alright, alright, now Spring’s

dependency injection is just too slow/cumbersome for you and you want dependency
injection on steroids? Use Square’s Dagger!

* https://google.github.io/dagger/[Dagger 2] And if Dagger is simply burning too

much CPU cycles for you and you’re still left unsatisfied with the startup time,
use Google’s fork Dagger 2 ;)

== Frontend / CMS

* https://www.adobe.com/solutions/web-experience-management.html[AEM / CQ5]
Especially in Germany there’s a ton of CQ5 jobs at the moment, as a fair amount of
big companies using it as a CMS to build websites. We’re not the biggest fans, but
have to acknowledge its market share.

* https://www.magnolia-cms.com/[Magnolia CMS] Magnolia on the other hand,

especially with its Spring integration Blossom is a really nice JCR-based CMS. Give
it a try.

* https://wicket.apache.org/[Wicket] Wicket is one of the few Apache projects,

which rock. Yes you might be scared of the session usage and components, but if you
get behind your fears it is a rock solid choice.

* https://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/comparing_jvm_web_frameworks_at[Matt Raible’s
list for the rest] If you feel pissed off because we did not mention web framework
xyz, check out Matt Raible’s comparison of the remaining 9999999 Java web
frameworks.

== Database

* https://jadira.sourceforge.net/usertype-userguide.html[Jadira Usertypes] Want to

persist Joda Time/Money to a database using Hibernate? Use Jadira.

* https://code.google.com/p/jdbcdslog/[JDBCslog] Most JDBC drivers do in fact

support logging, but if you want to have a portable choice, use JDBCSlog or any of
its forks. Beware, it is somewhat buggy, but most of the time it does the job.

* https://www.liquibase.org/[Liquibase] Database migrations. What else can we say.

We have it in production in a banking environment and it does everything it is
supposed to do.

* https://flywaydb.org/[Flyway] If you are scared of a tiny bit of xml however and

just want to do SQL-only database migrations, you might wanna give Flyway a try.

== Utilities, Utilities, Utilities

* https://github.com/google/guava[Guava] In general, forget Apache Commons. Use

Guava for collections, caching, primitives support, concurrency libraries, common
annotations, string processing, I/O, and so forth.

* https://github.com/kohsuke/args4j[Args4j] Yet another command line argument

parsing library, this time from Kohsuke.

* https://www.joda.org/joda-money/[Joda Money] A very good start if you have to do

anything money related on the JVM and before Java 9 comes out.

* https://github.com/Netflix/archaius[Archaius] Do you still have to reload your

application because you changed a .properties file? Check out Netflix’s Archaius,
which is a hell of a configuration management library.

* https://www.joda.org/joda-time/[Joda Time] Cannot use Java 8 and its new date

api? Then use Joda time.

* https://jamonapi.sourceforge.net/[Jamon] The Java Application Monitor (JAMon) is

a free, simple, high performance, thread safe, Java API that allows developers to
easily monitor production applications.

* https://freemarker.org/[Freemarker] We didn’t want to mention Freemarker here, as

we have seen way too many Freemarker stack traces over the years, but no matter how
you put it, Freemarker is still an often used templating language.

* https://jcommander.org/[JCommander] Although somewhat dead and somewhat buggy,

JCommander still does an ok job when you want to parse command line arguments.

* https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/jetty-announce/msg00060.html[Jetty] We’re
huge fans of jetty, especially as an embedded http server. And with version 9.1 -
see the link - it even got shockingly fast ;)

* https://www.jpos.org/[JPos / JCard] For payment/credit-card dev check out the

ISO–8583 implementation.

* https://code.google.com/p/reflections/[org.reflections] A reflections library++.

* https://www.jcraft.com/jsch/[Jsch] If you want to do anything SSH related on the

JVM, chances are you will stumble upon Jsch (or net.schmizz)

* https://github.com/zeroturnaround/zt-zip[Zt-ZIP] There’s a ton of ways to

zip/unzip stuff in Java, but Zeroturnaround’s is one of the nicer ways that we’ve
found.

== Resilience

* https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix[Hystrix] A huge recommendation from us:

Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate points of
access to remote systems, services and 3rd party libraries, stop cascading failure
and enable resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable.

* https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy/wiki/Chaos-Monkey[Chaos Monkey] Another

huge recommendation. Let chaos monkey run against your production servers like
Netflix does and see how well you can recover :)

== Bean Mapping

* https://modelmapper.org/[ModelMapper] The new kid on the block: Simple,

Intelligent, Object Mapping.

* https://dozer.sourceforge.net/[Dozer] Another way to map your Java beans.

* https://commons.apache.org/[BeanUtils] The oldest way known to man to map and

copy your Java beans ;)

== Testing
* https://openjdk.java.net/projects/code-tools/jmh/[Java Micro Benchmark] If you
want to publish any sort of meaningful Java (Micro)Benchmark, use JMH!

* https://testng.org/doc/index.html[TestNG] Although we disagree with Cedric on a

couple of points, his TestNG library is, apart from JUnit, one of the de-facto unit
test tools in Java land.

* https://code.google.com/p/awaitility/[Awaitility] Need to do asynchronous testing

and have already written a bunch of boiler plate testing code? Forget it and use
this: `await().atMost(5, SECONDS).until(costumerStatusIsUpdated());`

* https://joel-costigliola.github.io/assertj/[AssertJ] Yep, there’s a ton of other

assertion libraries on the JVM, but AssertJ is one of the nicer ones.

* https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm[Cucumber-JVM] We are also somewhat in

love with the JVM port of cucumber, making „BDD fun“.

* https://github.com/mockito/mockito[Mockito] Need to mock/stub objects? No way

around mockito.

* https://code.google.com/p/rest-assured/[Rest-Assured] A good library for testing

and validating your REST services.

* https://code.google.com/p/subethasmtp/[Wiser / Subethamail] If you need a

lightweight smtp-server for your test-code, use Wiser.

== Marshalling/Unmarshalling/Parsing

* https://jaxb.java.net/[Jaxb] Not a library, but a specification and an, in our

opinion, complex and cumbersome one. Still, you sooner or later will be in a
project which is Jaxb’d.

* https://projectmanagernews.com/general/most-important-projects-codehaus/[XStream]
A simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again.

* https://projectmanagernews.com/general/most-important-projects-codehaus/[Jackson]
One of the best JSON marshallers/unmarshallers out there, can also do XML, a bunch
of other data formats and has a ton of extension modules.

* https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariJSON[Hikari-JSON] Still waiting for it,

but Brett announced that it is gonna kick every other JSON librarie’s butt ;)

* https://jsoup.org/[JSoup] JSoup is fantastic for parsing HTML in Java with the

best of DOM, CSS, and jQuery.

== Messaging / Distributed / Routing

* https://hazelcast.com/[Hazelcast] Need distributed, in-memory data for a tiny

cache or similar? Use Hazelcast.

* https://activemq.apache.org/[ActiveMQ] There’s also a gazillion of possibilities

to do messaging on the JVM, but you cannot go really wrong with ActiveMQ (or
Apollo)

* https://camel.apache.org/[Camel] Even though we think it is overkill in a lot of

situations, camel can actually make routing messages, events or other..things ;)
quite nice

== People of the year

[NOTE]
Take this list light-heartedly, yep there was only space for 5 and this year it is
quite database heavy :)

* https://github.com/lukaseder[Lukas Eder] Lukas is our own personal hero this

year, check out his blog and subscribe to his newsletter and give his JooQ library
a try.

* https://github.com/brettwooldridge[Brett Wooldrige] Brett is doing insanely good

work with HikariCP, but even more you should check out his FAQ pages, where you’ll
get a ton of knowledge on how connection pooling etc works.

* https://winand.at/[Markus Winand] If you haven’t already, buy his book „SQL

Performance Explained“.

* https://www.jetbrains.com/[JetBrains] We love everything Jetbrains does and have

most of their tools. Stop using Eclipse, Jenkins and all the Atlasssian stuff
already! ;)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrDnuvHfBr4[Larry Ellison] Is your question: Are

we a loser? NO! KNOW WHAT THEY USE? THEY USE ORACLE!

== Build

* https://maven.apache.org/[Maven] Love it or hate it, but as a build tool Maven is

gonna stay.

* https://www.gradle.org/[Gradle] But if you are fed up with Maven, give Gradle a

try. IDE integrations have gotten better this year and even though the number one
complaint we hear is „people are going to shoot themselves even more in the foot
than with maven“, we think you should stop complaining and RTFM ;)

* https://pantsbuild.github.io/[The Pants] If you want to go for a completely new

kid on the block, check out Pants.

== Languages

* https://kotlinlang.org/[Kotlin] You read the point above with our unconditional

Jetbrains love? In all seriousness, Kotlin , as long as you are IntelliJ IDEA
based, is a great JVM language.

* https://www.scala-lang.org/[Scala] If it wasn’t for the compiler speed…;)

* https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/overview/java8-2100321.html[Java
8] Nothing really we can say, but anyway Java 8 is not going to help if your
client is stuck on 1.4 for whatever bogus reasons, huh? ;)

== Http Stuff

* https://square.github.io/okhttp/[OkHttp] A good new http client.

* https://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/[Apache Http Client] The default

choice for http.

== Repositories

* https://www.jfrog.com/open-source/[Artifactory] Nice functionality, looks

horrible. Get a designer jfrog!
* https://www.sonatype.org/nexus/[Nexus] Looks nice and does what it is supposed to
do.

== Databases

* https://www.oracle.com/database/index.html[Oracle] Disregarding how much it

costs, Oracle is a rock solid database. This year we played a lot with selecting
data straight from Oracle as XML and pushing it directly into the
HttpServletOutputstream (crazy stuff), push updates and more. You gotta love the
features noone knows about.

* https://www.h2database.com/html/main.html[H2] The best embedded database we know.

Thomas Mueller, you rock!

* https://www.postgresql.org/[Postgres] Postgres is getting better with every

release and they are also doing fantastic work!

== NoSql!

Just NO! ;)

== JVM

* https://zeroturnaround.com/software/jrebel/[JRebel] Zeroturnaround is so active

in marketing, chances are you will have heard of JRebel by now. Yep, no more (or
fewer) restarts of your Java application, less waiting times.

* https://chrononsystems.com/[Chronon] Chronon is such a nice idea, it is basically

a DVR for your Java programmes. A pity it still has a ton of problems with
generated byte code and is somewhat unusable for us in non-trivial projects.

* https://plumbr.eu/[Plumbr] If you are experience memory leaks etc. give Plumbr a

try. Not only is the tool good, but they actually have excellent customer support
and will help you analysing stuff.

== IDEs

* https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/[IntelliJ IDEA] The.Best.IDE.In.The.World.Period.

* https://eclipse.org/[Eclipse] If you are too poor to afford IDEA, keep using

Eclipse ;)

And that’s it for this year! Enjoy and let us know your recommendations!