The Most Widely Used Java Libraries
Update on 2020/10/07: This list was created nearly 10 years ago. The new list is available here.
This article summarizes the most popular and widely used Java libraries for a variety of different applications.
1. Core
- Apache Commons Lang - Apache's library that provides a host of helper utilities for the java.lang API, such as String manipulation, object creation, etc.
- Google Guava - Google's Core library for collections, caching, primitives support, etc. (example)
2. HTML, XML Parser
3. Web Frameworks
- Spring - an open source application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform. (example)
- Struts 2 - most popular web framework from Apache. (example)
- Google Web Toolkit - a development toolkit from Google for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications. (example)
- Strips - a presentation framework for building web applications using the latest Java technologies.
- Tapestry - component oriented framework for creating dynamic, robust, highly scalable web applications in Java.
Here is a comparison of those frameworks.
4. Chart, Report, Graph
- JFreeChart - creates charts such as bar charts, line charts, pie charts, etc.
- JFreeReport - creates PDF reports.
- JGraphT - create graph that contains a set of nodes connected by edges.
5. Windowing Libraries
- Swing - a GUI library from SDK. (example)
- SWT - a GUI library from eclipse.
SWT vs. Swing
6. GUI Frameworks
- Eclipse RCP. (example)
7. Natural Language Processing
- OpenNLP - a library from Apache. (example)
- Stanford Parser - a library from Stanford University. (example)
If you are an expert of NLP, here are more tools.
8. Static Analysis
- Eclipse JDT - a library from IBM which can manipulate Java source code. (example)
- WALA - a library that can process .jar file, i.e., bytecode. (example)
9. JSON
- Jackson - a multi-purpose Java library for processing JSON data format. Jackson aims to be the best possible combination of fast, correct, lightweight, and ergonomic for developers.
- XStream - a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again.
- Google Gson - a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation. (example)
- JSON-lib - a java library for transforming beans, maps, collections, java arrays and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans.
10. Math
- Apache Commons Math - provide functions for math and statistics.
11. Logging
- Apache Log4j - most popular logging library. (example)
- Logback - a successor to the popular log4j project.
The Simple Logging Facade for Java (SLF4J) - a simple facade or abstraction for various logging frameworks (e.g. java.util.logging, logback, log4j) allowing the end user to plug in the desired logging framework at deployment time.
12. Office-Complicant
- Apache POI - APIs for manipulating various file formats based upon Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format using pure Java.
- Docx4j - a Java library for creating and manipulating Microsoft Open XML (Word docx, Powerpoint pptx, and Excel xlsx) files.
--- More from comments ---
13. Date and Time
- Joda-Time - a quality replacement for the Java date and time classes.
14. Database
- Hibernate / EclipseLink / JPA
- JDO
- jOOQ
- SpringJDBC / Spring Data
- Apache DbUtils
Development Tools
- Lombok - a Java library meant to simplify the development of Java code writing
* 1) The list above are based on my own survey combined with personal experience. It is possible that they are not precisely THE MOST popular, but at least well-known.
* 2) I will keep updating this list to make it more complete and accurate. Thanks for your comments.
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