ONJava.com: The Hidden Gems of Jakarta Commons, Part 1

ONJava.com: The Hidden Gems of Jakarta Commons, Part 1: "he Hidden Gems of Jakarta Commons, Part 1
by Timothy M. O'Brien
12/22/2004

If you are not familiar with the Jakarta Commons, you have likely reinvented a few wheels. Before you write any more generic frameworks or utilities, grok the Commons. It will save you serious time. Too many people write a StringUtils class that duplicates methods available in Commons Lang's StringUtils, or developers unknowingly recreate the utilities in Commons Collections even though commons-collections.jar is already available in the classpath. Seriously, take a break. Check out the Commons Collections API and then go back to your task; I promise you'll find something simple that will save you a week over the next year. If people just took some time to look at Jakarta Commons, we would have much less code duplication--we'd start making good on the real promise of reuse. I've seen it happen; somebody digs into Commons BeanUtils or Commons Collections and invariably they have a 'Oh, if I had only known about this, I wouldn't have written 10,000 lines of code' moment. There are still parts of Jakarta Commons that remain a mystery to most; for instance, many have yet to hear of Commons CLI or Commons Configuration, and most have yet to notice the valuable functors package in Commons Collections. In this series, I emphasize some of the less-appreciated tools and utilities in the Jakarta Commons."