Lesser known 3rd Party Libraries For Every Project

Every project manager was a coder in his past life, and most of them carry their fortune in their current role as well. But still they become a bad guy to developers while creating a project delivery timelines. In some point of time we all must have met some projects which were planned very aggressively in terms of delivery. For small and early stage startups if getting a project is a challenge then delivering it on time is one step ahead. While talking to a team of iPhone application developers they confessed that the application development and delivery on time would have given them a real tough time  if it was to be done without using the third party library (Three 20 – the most common 3rd party Library for iPhone SDK). You blame it on customer’s weirdest requirement or the inability of native programing but the fact is that we have accepted that there is no feasible alternative to a third party library.  And the biggest question is what’s the harm? In the world of 3rd party libraries we get to hear about new kids on the block everyday. The Java 3rd party library ecosystem is a wild place. While everyone has heard of the big players such as Spring and Hibernate, too often the more humble, but equally important, libraries get left out in the cold

 

Some least heard but important such libraries which we have used in past are:

Unit Testing: DBUnit, Mockito, Hamcrest Matchers

Apache Common: Commons Configurations, Commons DbUtils, Commons IO, Commons Lang

Other: SLF4J, Google Collections, c3p0, Joda Time

 

Lets contribute by sharing your favorite but lesser known 3rd party libraries that no project should be without.