Education Ecosystem Blog

Having the right tools enables a Livecoding.tv engineer to produce high-quality projects. Today we will share some of our secrets with you as to what Java productivity tools, plugins, and libraries the streamers use to assist us to be highly proficient.

What Is Java?

According to the Java website, “Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!” Recently, Oracle has filed a law suit of staggering $9.3 billion against Google which has utilized Java’s application protocol interfaces. Such is the penetration of Java in today’s world. 

Java Productivity Tools, Plugins & Libraries

Here are the ten (10) best Java productivity tools, plugins, and libraries recommended by Livecoding.tv engineers:

Gradle

Gradle is a general-purpose build tool highly recommended by Livecoding.tv engineers. It is a quantum leap for build technology in the Java (JVM) world, and can build pretty much anything you care to implement in your build script.

Eclipse

An amazing open source community of Tools, Projects and

Collaborative Working Groups. Eclipse provides IDEs and platforms nearly every language and architecture.

YourKit

YourKit is a technology leader, creator of the most innovative and intelligent tools for profiling Java & .NET applications. The YourKit Java Profiler has been already recognized by the IT professionals and analysts as the best profiling tool.

Clover

Another productivity tool highly recommended by Livecoding.tv engineers is Clover. Clover provides the metrics you need to better balance the effort between writing code that does stuff, and code that tests stuff. Clover runs in your IDE or your continuous integration system, and includes test optimization to make your tests run faster, and fail more quickly.

Mockito

Mockito is a mocking framework that tastes really good. It lets you write beautiful tests with a clean & simple API. Mockito doesn’t give you hangover because the tests are very readable and they produce clean verification errors.

Jetty

The Jetty Web Server provides an HTTP server and Servlet container capable of     serving static and dynamic content either from a standalone or embedded instantiations. Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products. Jetty can be embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters.

Hibernate

Hibernate ORM enables developers to more easily write applications whose data outlives the application process. As an Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework, Hibernate is concerned with data persistence as it applies to relational databases (via JDBC).

Guava

The Guava project contains several of Google’s core libraries that Livecoding.tv engineers rely on in our Java-based projects: collections, caching, primitives support, concurrency libraries, common annotations, string processing, I/O, and so forth.

FindBugs

FindBugs is a program which uses static analysis to look for bugs in Java code. It is free software, distributed under the terms of the Lesser GNU Public License.

Java Decompiler

The “Java Decompiler project” aims to develop tools in order to decompile and analyze Java 5 “byte code” and the later versions.Livecoding.tv engineers find this a very handy tool that increases productivity.

In Conclusion

So there you have it: The ten (10) best Java productivity tools, plugins, and libraries to help you become more productive. What are your favorite Java productivity tools? What did we miss in this list that definitely needs to be added to make it complete?