Useful Java Web Application Libraries

Question

I'm new in Java Web Application programing and also in Java. I'm using GWT and SmartGWT to write web applications, but almost everything that is not included in this frameworks I have to write myself.

I saw that projects hosted in code.google.com use many cool Java libraries to make things easier :)

Can you please give me advice for libraries that you know and use and which will be also useful for me :)

Answer 1

It all depends on what you want to do and what you want to achieve. In my projects, I mostly talk to RESTful applications so I use libraries such as Google Gson. Libraries I mostly use are:

• MySQL Connector/J (JDBC Driver for MySQL)
• Google GSon (Json library from Google). Alternatively, if you want smaller library JSON object manipulation, get org.json JSONObject library.
• Apache Commons libraries (DBUtil for as a JDBC helper, Validators for validation, etc.). Actually, almost all Apache commons project are useful libraries.
• Apache Log4J for Logging purposes (as described by the Java Logging Framework).
• Google Guava which implements the java collections framework and java concurrency framework really well. It helps me in many instances.
• JBoss Hibernate. A ORM library for Java.

Those are the common stuff I use, but since I don't know exactly what you want to do, I don't if those can help you.

Answer 2

There are lots of useful libraries, but only some of them can be used on GWT's client side. Do your libraries have to work on the client side, too?

Can you please give me advice for libraries that you know and use and which will be also useful for me :)

What's useful for you really depends on what you want to achieve. Instead of looking for good libraries in general (there are so many), I'd say it's more useful to first think about the problem you need to solve - or at least the kind of problem you may have to solve in the future.

Without knowing anything specific, I could say (in random order): Google Guice/Gin, Guava, Apache Commons, Gson, Hibernate (or generally JPA), gwt-log, joda-time... because I find them quite useful.

Answer 3

I prefer you to go with Vaadin framework. It is nice framework which provides the look and feel.

Also you can take a look at demo. Hope you will love it.