Do you ever find yourself writing a piece of Java and thinking, “there must be a better way?” Java is such a popular language, there probably is! Here is a consolidated list of a few of the most useful Java libraries I’ve encountered. Using these libraries will increase your productivity and leverage the work someone else has already done!

1) Lombok

Project Lombok is a Java library that uses annotations to reduce boilerplate code. You can use annotations such as **@**Getter to automatically generate “getField()” methods. Here are a few of the supported annotations:

1. @Getter and @Setter, which generate Getters and Setters.
2. @EqualsAndHashCode automatically generates Equals and HashCode methods which adhere to the Equals and HashCode contracts.
3. @ToString will generate a toString() method which follows the format ClassName(fieldName=value, fieldName2=value…).
4. @Builder automatically implements the builder pattern for ease of constructing your POJO.
5. @Data is short-hand for @Getter, @Setter, @EqualsAndHashCode, @ToString, and @RequiredArgsConstructor!

There are many more supported annotations, all of which are highly customizable. Never write boilerplate again!

2) Guava

Guava is a Java library created and maintained by Google that contains many broadly applicable utilities that solve common problems in Java. Some of the features include:

1. Extensions to Collections, such as Multimap<K, V> which is a Map that supports multiple values for a given key, equivalent to Map<K, Collection> with a cleaner API.
2. The Graphs package which includes a number of utilities for modelling graph-type data
3. Concurrency utilities such as MoreExecutors, Atomics, and ListenableFuture

There is so much to dig into in the Guava library. Since it’s maintained by Google and widely used, you can be confident that their APIs have been thoroughly tested and carefully maintained. If you have a common Java problem to solve, Guava probably has a solution!

#java #spring-boot #programming #coding #libraries