A curated list of awesome Java frameworks, libraries and software. Inspired by awesome-python.
- Awesome Java
- Build Tool
- Code Analysis
- Compiler-compiler
- Continuous Integration
- Database
- Date and Time
- Dependency Injection
- Development
- Distributed Applications
- Distribution
- Document Processing
- GUI
- Game Development
- High Performance
- HTTP
- IDE
- JVM and JDK
- JSON
- Logging
- Machine Learning
- Messaging
- Miscellaneous
- Natural Language Processing
- Networking
- ORM
- Security
- Science
- Server
- Template Engine
- Testing
- Utility
- Visualization
- Web Crawling
- Web Frameworks
- REST Frameworks
- Resources
- Contributing
Tools which handle the buildcycle of an application.
- Apache Maven - Declarative build and dependency management which favors convention over configuration. It's preferable to Apache Ant which uses a rather procedural approach and can be rather difficult to maintain.
- Gradle - Incremental builds which are programmed via Groovy instead of declaring XML. Works well with Maven's dependency management and treats Ant scripts as first-class citizens.
Tools that provide metrics and quality measurements of static code.
- SonarQube - Inspection tool for code quality. It integrates with several external tools like Gradle, Jira and Jenkins and provides an overview of the metrics over time.
- FindBugs - Static analysis of bytecode to find potential bugs.
- Metrics - Measures the behavior of critical components.
Tools that create parsers, interpreters or compilers.
- ANTLR - Complex full-featured framework for top-down parsing.
- JavaCC - More specific and slightly easier to learn. Has syntactic lookahead.
Tools which support continuously building, testing and releasing applications.
- Jenkins - Provides server-based services. Often seen as the successor to Hudson, although it is still actively developed.
- Travis - A hosted continuous integration service that integrates with GitHub repositories.
- Shippable - Based on Docker, it provides also Bitbucket integration.
Everything which simplifies interactions with the database.
- jOOQ - Generates typesafe code based on SQL schema.
- Liquibase - Source control for your database which can be embedded.
Libraries related to date and time.
- Java 8 SE: Date and Time API - Basically, it incorporates Joda-Time.
- Joda-Time - De facto standard date/time-library before Java 8.
Libraries that help to realize the Inversion of Control paradigm.
- Dagger - Compile-time injection framework without reflection, mainly for Android.
- Google Guice - Lightweight but powerful framework.
- Spring - Only Spring Context is needed for injections.
- Weld - CDI reference implementation.
Integrated environments that augment the process of development at a fundamental level, e.g. classloading.
- DCEVM - Modification of the JVM that allows unlimited redefinition of loaded classes at runtime.
- JRebel - Instantly reloads code and configuration changes without redeploys.
Libraries and frameworks used to ease writing distributed and fault-tolerant applications.
- Akka - Toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault tolerant event-driven applications.
- JGroups - Toolkit for reliable messaging and creating clusters whose nodes can send messages to each other.
- Apache ZooKeeper - Coordination service with distributed configuration, synchronization, and naming registry for large distributed systems.
Tools which handle the distribution of Java applications in native formats.
- Launch4j - Wraps JARs in lightweight and native Windows executables.
- packr - Packs your JAR, assets and JVM for native distribution on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
- Bintray - Version control for your binaries which handles the publishing. Can also be used with Maven or Gradle.
Libraries that assist with processing office document formats.
- Apache POI - Supports OOXML (e.g XLSX, DOCX, PPTX) as well as OLE2 (e.g. XLS, DOC or PPT).
- jOpenDocument - Processes the OpenDocument format.
Libraries to create modern graphical user interfaces.
- JavaFX - The successor of Swing.
- Scene Builder - Visual layout tool for JavaFX applications.
Frameworks that support the development of games.
- jMonkeyEngine - Game engine for modern 3D development.
- LWJGL - Robust framework that abstracts libraries like OpenGL/CL/AL.
- libGDX - All-round cross-platform, high-level framework.
Everything about high performance computation, from collections to specific libraries.
- Trove - Primitive collections.
- HPPC - Primitive collections.
- Disruptor - Inter-thread messaging library.
- Javalution - Library for real-time and embedded systems.
Libraries for working with HTTP.
- OkHttp - An HTTP+SPDY client for Android and Java applications.
Integrated development environments that try to simplify several aspects of development.
- NetBeans - Provides integration for several Java SE and EE features starting with database access and servers to HTML5 and AngularJS.
- Eclipse - Does a lot of things in the background. Noteworthy are its large amount of plugins.
- IntelliJ IDEA - Supports a lot of JVM languages and provides good options for Android development. The commercial edition targets the enterprise sector.
Various implementations of the JVM/JDK.
- HotSpot - Official JVM.
- JDK 9 - Early access releases of JDK 9.
- OpenJDK - Open source implementation.
Libraries that simplify JSON processing.
- Google Gson - Serializes Java objects to JSON and vice versa. Good performance with on-the-fly usage.
- Jackson - Similar to GSON but has performance gains if you need to instantiate the library more often.
Libraries that log the behavior of an application.
- Apache Log4j 2 - Complete rewrite of the previous version. Now has a powerful plugin and configuration architecture.
- Logback - Founded by the same developer as Log4j and proves to be a robust logging library with interesting configuration options via Groovy.
- SLF4J - Abstraction layer which is to be used with an implementation.
Tools that provide specific statistical algorithms which allow to learn from data.
- Apache Hadoop - Open-source software framework for storage and large-scale processing of data-sets on clusters of commodity hardware.
- Apache Mahout - Scalable algorithms focused on collaborative filtering, clustering and classification.
- Apache Spark - Open-source data analytics cluster computing framework.
- Weka - Collection of algorithms for data mining tasks ranging from pre-processing to visualization.
Tools that help sending messages between clients to ensure protocol independency.
- Apache ActiveMQ - Open-source message broker that implements JMS and converts synchronous to asynchronous communication.
- Apache Kafka - High-throughput distributed messaging system.
- JBoss HornetQ - Clear, concise, modular and made to be embedded.
Everything else.
- Jimfs - In-memory file system.
- Lanterna - Easy console text GUI library similar to curses.
- Lombok - Code-generator which aims to reduce the verbosity of Java.
- RoboVM - Write native iOS apps in Java.
Libraries that specialize on processing text.
- Apache OpenNLP - Toolkit for common tasks like tokenization.
- LingPipe - Toolkit for a variety of tasks ranging from POS tagging to sentiment analysis.
- Mallet - Statistical natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, etc.
Libraries for network programming.
- Netty - A framework for building high performance network applications.
APIs which handle the persistence of objects.
- EclipseLink - Supports a number of persistence standards: JPA, JAXB, JCA and SDO.
- Hibernate - Robust and widely used with an active community.
Everything that helps with the creation of PDF files.
- Apache FOP - Creates PDF from XSL-FO.
- Apache PDFBox - Toolbox for creating and manipulating PDF.
- JasperReports - Complex reporting engine.
- DynamicReports - Simplifies JasperReports.
- iText - Easy to use PDF library which creates PDF files programmatically but requires a license for commercial purposes.
Libraries that handle security, authentication, authorization or session management.
- Apache Shiro - Performs authentication, authorization, cryptography and session management.
- Keycloak - Integrated SSO and IDM for browser apps and RESTful web services. Currently in beta but looks very promising.
- PicketLink - PicketLink is an umbrella project for security and identity management for Java applications.
- Spring Security - Focuses on authentication/authorization and protects against several attack vectors.
Libraries for scientific computing and analysis.
- JScience - Comprehensive framework of science related libraries.
- JTransforms - Multithread FFT library.
- Parallel Colt - Multithread high performance scientific and technical computing.
- SCaVis - Environment for scientific computation, data analysis and data visualization.
Servers which are specifically used to deploy applications.
- GlassFish - Open source reference implementation for Java EE sponsored by Oracle.
- WildFly - Formerly known as JBoss and developed by Red Hat with extensive Java EE support.
- Jetty - Lightweight, small server, often embedded in projects.
- Apache Tomcat - Robust all-round server for Servlet and JSP.
- Apache TomEE - Tomcat plus Java EE.
Tools which substitute expressions in a template.
- Apache Velocity - Templates for HTML pages, emails or source code generation in general.
- FreeMarker - General templating engine without any heavyweight or opinionated dependencies.
- JavaServer Pages - Aged templating for websites with custom tag libraries.
- Thymeleaf - Aims to be a substitute for JSP and works for XML files in general.
Tools that test from object to interface level including performance and other benchmarks.
- AssertJ - Fluent assertions.
- Apache JMeter - Functional testing and performance measurements.
- Arquillian - Integration and functional testing platform with integration of Java EE containers.
- Calipher - Microbenchmarking framework.
- FEST - Collection of testing libraries.
- Hamcrest - Framework for writing declarative assertion matchers.
- JMH - Microbenchmarking.
- JUnit - Testing framework.
- Mockito - Creation of test double objects in automated unit tests for the purpose of TDD or BDD.
- Selenium - Portable software testing framework for web applications.
- TestNG - Testing framework.
- VisualVM - Visual interface for viewing detailed information about Java applications while they are running on a JVM.
Libraries which provide unspecific functionality, e.g. optimized datastructures.
- Apache Commons - Provides different general purpose functions like configuration, validation, collections, file upload or XML processing.
- Google Guava - Collections, caching, primitives support, concurrency libraries, common annotations, string processing, I/O, and so forth.
- javatuples - Does what it says, although the concept of tuples in general is debatable.
Libraries or frameworks which allow you to visualize data.
- Processing - A project deeply rooted in visual art which allows you to program the visualization of data.
Libraries that analyze the content of websites.
- Apache Nutch - Highly extensible, highly scalable Web crawler for production environment.
- Crawler4j - Simple lightweight alternative.
- jsoup - Scrapes, parses, manipulates and cleans HTML.
Frameworks that handle the communication between the layers of an web application.
- Apache Tapestry - Component oriented framework for creating dynamic, robust, highly scalable web applications in Java.
- Spring - Aims to simplify the development with Java EE and provides packages for dependency injection and aspect-oriented programming.
- Spring Boot - Microframework which simplifies the development of new Spring applications.
- Vaadin - Event-driven framework build on top of GWT. Uses server-side architecture with Ajax on the client-side.
- Google Web Toolkit - Toolbox which includes a Java-to-JavaScript compiler for client-side code, XML parser, API for RPC, JUnit integration, internationalization support and widgets for the GUI.
- Grails - Groovy framework with the aim to provide a highly productive environment by favoring convention over configuration, no XML and support for mixins.
- Apache Wicket - Component-based web application framework similar to Tapestry with a stateful GUI.
- Play - Uses convention over configuration, hot code reloading and display of errors in the browser.
- PrimeFaces - JSF framework which has a free and a commercial version with support. Provides several frontend components.
- Spark - Unique framework which focuses not on complex MVC patterns but on rapid development.
Frameworks specifically for creating RESTful services.
- Dropwizard - Opinionated framework for setting up modern web applications, includes Jetty, Jackson, Jersey and Metrics.
- Jersey - JAX-RS reference implementation.
- RESTEasy - Fully certified and portable implementation of the JAX-RS specification.
- Retrofit - A type-safe REST client for Java.
Active discussions.
- r/java - Subreddit for the Java community.
- stackoverflow - Question/answer platform.
Books about Java that had a high impact and are still worth reading.
Something to listen to while programming.
People to follow.
- Adam Bien
- Antonio Goncalves
- Arun Gupta
- Ed Burns
- Java
- Java EE
- Java.net
- Java Magazine
- Mark Reinhold
- OpenJDK
- Pete Muir
- Reza Rahman
- Simon Maple
- Tim Boudreau
Sites to read.
Contributions are very welcome!
Please have a look at CONTRIBUTING for guidelines.
Topics which have no libraries as of yet are located in TOPICS.