Best tools for Java development

A developer without tools and tricks are like a toothless lion, hence it's very important that developer devote some time to learning tools required for their day to day job. A plenty of Java tools designed to make it significantly simpler to work with Java. Alongside the big names and established tools, the market is bubbling with fresh tools and frameworks, and most of the people may haven't heard about them yet. In order to become a good developer, you must know the right tools for the right jobs. Good knowledge of tools and mastery of using them, saves a lot of time in design, development, testing, debugging, and troubleshooting any production issue. In this article, we gather a short list of such tools, some are Java specific and some support other languages as well, but they’re all great for Java projects and share a vision of simplicity. Learning these tools can help you to improve the quality of your code and become a more efficient Java developer.

So, let's scroll -

Bintray

Java developers are being kept in the dark in a way when importing libraries from “anonymous” repositories. Bintray adds a face to the code and actually, serves as a social platform for developers to share open-source packages. It has over 85,000 packages in 18,000 repositories while showcasing popular repositories and new releases. It adds a social layer and offers an easy process to upload files to a CDN.

Librato

A hosted service for monitoring and managing cloud applications, Librato can create custom dashboards in seconds without a need to set up or deploy any software. Oh, and it just looks and feels so buttery smooth compared to other dashboards. It Integrates with Heroku, AWS, tens of collection agents (Even Nest) and pure language bindings with Java, Clojure and others. It has beautiful graphs with annotations, correlations, sharing and embedding options.

JClarity

Launched last September, JClarity is now offering two products around Java performance: Illuminate and Censum. Illuminate is a performance monitoring tool, while Censum is an application focused on garbage collection logs analysis. More than just collecting data or visualizing it, both tools provide actionable insights to solve the issues they detect.

Gradle

Build tool. Automates the building, testing, publishing, deployment, and more of software as well as generating static websites or documentation. Gradle is a project automation tool that builds on the features of Apache Maven and Apache Ant. While Gradle isn’t the most popular build tool available (that honor goes to Maven, which  68% of Java developers prefer), it’s quickly gaining popularity. It also serves as the default build tool for Android.

OverOps

OverOps was built with a simple objective in mind: Telling developers exactly when and why production code breaks. Whenever a new exception is thrown or a log error occurs - OverOps captures it and shows you the variable state which caused it, across methods and machines. OverOps will overlay this over the actual code which executed at the moment of error - so you can analyze the exception as if you were there when it happened.

YourKit

It's a Java profiler. Combines powerful analysis capabilities, on-demand profiling during both development and production, free embedding into production, and seamless IDE and application server integration.

FindBugs

Static code analyzer. Classifies potential errors in code as scariest, scary, troubling, or “of concern.” Available as a standalone GUI or as a plugin for Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ, Gradle, Hudson, and Jenkins.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch has been around for a while, but Elasticsearch 1.0.0 was released just recently in February. It’s an open-source project built on top of Apache Lucene and hosted on GitHub with over 200 contributors. Elasticsearch provides is easy to use scalable distributed RESTful search.

Spark

Back to pure Java, Spark is a Sinatra inspired micro web framework for quickly creating web applications. It was rewritten earlier this year to support Java 8 and lambdas, Spark is open-source and its code is available on GitHub. It’s being developed by Per Wendel and a small number of contributors over the last few years in a mission to support rapid creation of web applications with minimal effort.

Plumbr

Going deeper in the JVM, the Garbage Collector scans for objects that are no longer being used. However, sometimes developers will still hold references to objects in memory they no longer use. This is where memory leaks happen, and where Plumbr comes in. It detects and reports if the application has memory leakage issues and provides actionable information to fix it.

Checkstyle

It is a development tool to help programmers write Java code that adheres to a coding standard. It automates the process of checking Java code. It is highly configurable and can be made to support almost any coding standard.

PMD

It is a source code analyzer. It can detect common programming flaws like unused variables, empty catch blocks, unnecessary object creation, and so forth. It supports most languages, apart from Java and includes CPD, the copy-paste-detector.

Guava

It's a utility library. Contains core libraries that Google relies on Java-based projects: collections, caching, primitives support, concurrency libraries, common annotations, string processing, I/O, and so forth.

IntelliJ

IDE made by JetBrains, available in an Apache 2-licensed community edition and a commercial edition. IntelliJ provides similar features to Eclipse, with a smooth, developer-friendly experience.

JUnit

JUnit is an open source unit testing tool for Java programming language. It is an important tool for test-driven development and deployment. Preparation of input data and setup/creation of fake objects. It loading databases with a specific known set of data. It provides annotations so that test classes can have fixture run before or after every test. It provides support for writing and running tests. It provides annotations to identify test methods, assertions for testing expected results. JUnit tests allow writing codes faster, which increases quality.

JRat

JRat is a Java Runtime Analysis Toolkit. It is easy to use, open source performance profiler for the Java platform. It can monitor an application's execution and performance measurements. With JRat, easy file transfers to any location on any computer. Allows a remote view on jRAT, provide support for website Redirection, allows modifying system files, helps users to process on their systems.

Mockito

Mockito is an Open Source Java Mocking and Unit Testing Tool. Mockito is a popular open source Java mocking framework. It helps developers to write clean, well-designed and loosely-coupled code. It can be used to write Behaviour Driven Development style tests with syntactic sugar facilitates. It offers nice, easily readable syntax. It also provides some annotations needed for reducing boilerplate code Mockito allows writing of relaxed tests.

Clover

Clover is a Java tool for generating code coverage reports from unit tests. It can be executed as a plugin in Ant, Eclipse, or Maven. It can also use to collect coverage data of integration tests. It's open source and free to use tool for Java. It's very easy to use because of on-the-fly bytecode, full coverage and metrics for the latest test run, inline annotation helps to visually highlight statement-level coverage, test optimization feature makes it painless to run the test suite before every check-in.

Ehcache

Ehcache is an open source, a standards-based caching tool for Java language. It is a robust, proven, full-featured tool which can be integrated with other popular libraries and frameworks. Ehcache strives to maintain a small footprint to keep apps as light as possible. It revamped API that leverages Java generics and Cache interactions. API is very simple and easy to use, scalable to hundreds of caches. It allows box Spring Caching and Hibernates integration to with javax.cache support.

Oracle JDeveloper

Oracle JDeveloper is a free Java development IDE. It allows developers to build reliable Service Oriented Architecture with Java. It supports the full development lifecycle.

VisualVM

VisualVM is a visual tool for integrating command-line JDK tools. It also offers lightweight profiling capabilities. It is designed for both development and production time use.

Cobertura

Cobertura is a free Java tool that calculates the percentage of code accessed by tests. It can also be used to identify which parts of the Java program are lacking test coverage.

Groovy

Groovy is a programming language that both simplifies and extends Java by adding new keywords, auto-importing commonly used classes, and optionally typed variable declarations.

 

Hope, these tools will make your life easy as a Java developer. Choose tools that suit your needs and requirements at a given point in time and it will deliver the returns you are looking for. You can share your comments in the comment section. Thank you!