Java developers have very high job prospects in the software development industry. Rightfully so, Java powers a lot of the world’s desktop, web and mobile applications and servers. Most companies that recruit Java developers are in the most mature industries such as health care.
Consequently, it is important for Java developers to be effective and efficient in their jobs.
Below are six of the most helpful tools that Java developers should consider using.
Netbeans
A few Java developers will not recognize Netbeans. It’s a multi-language open-source Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
Far from being a simple text editor, it provides some neat features that helps developers become productive.
Key features include its syntax-highlighting makes it easy to refactor code as it not only gives you syntax information but also semantics. It also provides great templates and wizards for a wide array of programming languages.
It is also a learning platform — it has a comprehensive Java tutorial (and also PHP). Another thing that stands out with Netbeans is it makes it easy for developers to manage their projects by using favorites and versioning. It also syncs well with Github.
The community continuously creates a lot of powerful tools to make using Netbeans more pleasurable.
Rookout
As a Java developer, as with all developers, finding and solving bugs are two of the most time consuming activities. These not only eat up a lot of time but cause a lot of unnecessary distress whenever it seems a bug gives birth to other bugs down the line.
The problem exacerbates when the bug is experienced in production and the operations team would want you to fix the bugs in production code.
While it’s important to have a good debugging strategy in place, it is even more essential to have the right tools to help you do it. After all, our human eyes are limited in what they can sense.
Here’s where a debugging tool like Rookout can help. It allows you to debug in any environment. Operations team wants you to go and figure out what’s wrong with the code shipped to production? You can do remote live debugging there. You can also implement production debugging, allowing for a seamless experience.
It also enhances collaboration through providing great data and insights on bugs found and also shares on-demand business metrics.
JUnit
Fixing bugs is a great thing. But oftentimes code that doesn’t exhibit bugs still doesn’t behave as expected during execution. For instance, declaring a wrong class for the number 1 (declaring it as a string instead of an integer) may not cause bugs but certainly when you try to add 1 to another number in the program it will perform string concatenation instead of mathematical addition.
This error can be caught through automated tests.
JUnit is a testing tool of choice for Java devs. It’s an open source framework. It typically uses annotations in order for the tests to have fixtures prior to running them. Some of its advantages include the simplicity of using it, it immediately provides reports, it not only allows you to write tests but also a whole test suite.
Most IDEs support JUnit and so it has become one of the most popular, if not the most popular, testing frameworks for Java.
Apache Maven
Apache Maven is simply a software project management software. While you can probably use any other tools for the purpose, Maven also manages builds for your Java projects.
Its principle of operation is based on the project object model (POM) concept. Building one project using Maven will automatically make it easier for you to build succeeding ones. One of the things that help increase Java developer productivity is its automatic dependency updating.
Since it’s open source, the community is always adding new tools into its already massive library. You won’t need a lot of configurations when new useful tools come or updates are needed.
Apache Groovy
Apache Groovy is an altogether different programming language. However, it is starting to become very popular among Java developers.
Java is a statically-typed language, meaning it needs to check for variable types during compiling. This is in contrast to languages such as Python or JavaScript (dynamically typed languages which checks for types during execution).
While there are lots of advantages of writing code in a statically-typed way, dynamic languages offer an advantage of speed. Groovy allows you to write Java the dynamically typed way.
It has a very short learning curve so it’s quick to hop on.
While experienced Java devs shouldn’t need to go and learn it, it’s a great starting point for those coming from Ruby or Python to try out Java.
Spark
Apache Spark allows Java developers to create data processing intensive applications. It allows for processing huge amounts of data in a fast and scalable way.
It is a framework based on Hadoop’s MapReduce programming model. It even extends this model to include computations on a wide array of data types and query types (including streaming).
For Java developers interested in Data Science will very much love it.
Conclusion
Productivity is more than just using tools. It is important that a developer also knows how to play well with the whole team. However, these tools, whether individually or used together, can in fact increase the amount of quality work done by developers.
