Rocking out with Google Guava

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

I’ll show you some cool features that could make you like Guava Libraries even more:

• Multimaps
• I’m pretty sure that at least one time in you life you have needed a Map<Foo, Collection<Bar>> or something similar, huh? If not, someday you will need it, and when you need, you will see the crap that is doing a lot of checks for a existing collection with some key and creating and adding it if it isn’t there.
• Ordering - Basically, a fluent comparator class, with a lot of utilities… you will be surprised when you see how cow it is, and will ask yourself how could I live without it until now?, you can bet.
• Objects#equal - A null safe equals method. Never write if(foo != null && bar != null && foo.equals(bar)) in your life again. BTW, take a look in all Object common methods , you can use Objects#firstNonNull(Object, Object), as example, while Elvis operator and Java 8 are not ready :)
• @Nullable and other utilities to help you follow the Null Object Pattern.
• IO Handling, the Files class e.g.. Want to read the lines of a text file? Are you opening a BufferedReader? Don’t do that:

Collection<String> lines = Files.readLines(mytxtFile, Charsets.UTF8);

Simple, uh?

• Splitters and Joinners. Suppose that our text filed used in the other example contains a lot of columns divided by a pipe (|), now, how can we parse it? Simple! Iterate the collection of string provided by Files.readLines, and do something like:

Iterable<String> columns = Splitter
  .on('|')
  .trimResults()
  .omitEmptyStrings()
  .split(line);

Pretty easy :)

• Preconditions plus a static import made your arguments, state and null check easy and clean, throwing the respective exceptions (IllegalStateException, IllegalArgumentException, NullPointerException, etc…).
• Immutable collections types (Immutable Maps, Lists, Sets, etc…).
• CharMatcher. pretty easy way to match characteres sequences, eg:

String phoneNumber = CharMatcher
  .DIGIT
  .retainFrom("my phone number is 123456789");
CharMatcher
  .inRange('a','z')
  .or(inRange('A','Z'));

• There are also Functional classes, maybe you will want to use them.
• EventBus. Basically, a better EventListener.
• Caching. Make your app faster.

These are, IMHO, the best features in Guava. But, there is much more.

If you want to use it in a maven project, just add to your pom.xml:

<dependency>
	<groupId>com.google.guava</groupId>
	<artifactId>guava</artifactId>
	<version>15.0</version>
</dependency>

If you are not using maven, you can download the last version in this page.

Cool links

• A question in stackoverflow, talking about some Guava Features;

The project still active, the last release (19) is from Dec 2015.

That’s all. Cheers.

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