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Andrew (he/him)
Andrew (he/him)

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Java Developers, What's in Your Toolkit?

What IDEs, frameworks, languages, and other software do you use on a regular or semi-regular basis? Spring? Android Studio? Git? Maven / Gradle / Ant? What do you use for the front-end? React? Vue? JavaFX?

I'll go first:

Language(s): Java, some Scala

Project Management: Maven

Version Control: Git, GitHub, GitLab

Database: MongoDB, H2, Hadoop, or Derby, but I've also used MySQL and PostgreSQL (I'm flexible)

IDEs / Editors: nano mainly, but starting to use Eclipse and VS Code more

Front-End: I've dabbled in JavaFX, but I'm trying to learn some more JavaScript, including ReactJS

Other: Trying to catch up and learn REST / Spring, and Android Development

It looks a lot more intimidating now that I've written it all out like that!

How about you? What are you using and what are you learning? Let me know in the comments!

Top comments (55)

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

Language: Kotlin
Frontend: Angular/Typescript
Desktop app: tornado FX
IDE : Jetbrains IDEA
build system: gradle
Server side: spring boot, http4k, ktor, GraphQL

A word of caution: "catching up with Android development" is a full time job or more, I wouldn't recommend it as a side thing

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johnson_cor profile image
Corey Johnson

What do you mean; Android doesn't change that fast. \s

Once I took a 6 month break from Android development and literally everything had changed. Fragments were now considered a compat library class, ViewModels and live data were king, and there was this looming nightmare for existing projects called AndroidX

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Yeah I meant it more as "trying to get a flavor for" Android development. Maybe make a small app or two to understand the process. Do you know of any good resources?

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johnson_cor profile image
Corey Johnson

I would honestly recommend just working through the developer.android.com/ tutorials; they give you a good overview of how things work! Patience is key though, it takes a while to really grasp how everything works together

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

As I said, I would actually recommend avoiding that resource.

I take seriously this honest admission by Diane Hackborn that the Android team doesn't really know or care how you should build your app

cnblogs.com/jarvisyin/p/6361184.html

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johnson_cor profile image
Corey Johnson

I think it's great that you're providing other resources, but I don't quite understand why you would knock the official documentation since there are resources there that aren't just tutorials. I know it's not perfect, but it can be a good starting point to investigate things further. I've looked at reywenderlich in the past and found their tutorials really helpful.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

I feel that the android documentation is preaching a lot of bad things, in particular all the examples still tell you to put your logic inside God Activities, Fragments, Context, ...

I also feel that they are not talking about lots of good libraries, just because they do not come from them, but do talk about a lot of bad libraries, just because they come from them.

I was probably too harsh, do read the parts of the developer.android.com that are good, like Room for example. But always keep a critical mind and use other sources as well. Learn Kotlin from Jetbrains for example.

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johnson_cor profile image
Corey Johnson

I agree that often times they recommend particularly unhelpful resources. The worst offender in my opinion is the networking libraries. I have NO idea why they do not recommend okhttp and retrofit. Maybe one day they'll open source their docs so the community can help maintain them

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

It's simple,
Retrofit and okhttp do not come from them so they don't document it.
AsyncTask and IntentService do come from them so they document it.

It makes sense from their perspective, but from the perspective of someone learning how to build the app, you end up not learning about the right thing.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Avoid at all costs the official Android documentation, it's bad.

I would recommend those tutorials
raywenderlich.com/

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Thanks, Jean-Michel! And thanks for the discussion with Corey! I'll check out the resources you recommended as well as developer.android.com (taking the latter with a grain of salt).

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peiche profile image
Paul • Edited

Language(s): Java

Project Management: Manual, npm/Yarn for front-end

Version Control: CVS, GitHub, Bitbucket

Database: DB2, Oracle SQL

IDEs / Editors: Eclipse, VSCode

Front-End: JavaScript, jQuery, a little dabbling in React

Other: CSS custom properties and grid

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Is "Manual" a tool or are you actually doing everything by hand?

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peiche profile image
Paul

I might have anticipated that. It's by hand.

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Haha, all these packages have ridiculous names nowadays, you'll have to forgive me. :-)

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peiche profile image
Paul

No worries, man. You never know!

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agilebelma profile image
Belma

Language(s): Java, Kotlin

Project Management: Team City

Version Control: Git, BitBucket, GitKracken

Database: MongoDB and MySQL

IDEs / Editors: IntelliJ IDEA

Front-End: ReactJS

Other: TypeScript

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

I've never heard of Team City, what is that?

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igorperikov profile image
Igor Perikov

It's a ci/cd service from jetbrains - company behind kotlin and intellij. Though I wouldn't call it project management tool

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mojo2012 profile image
Matti

Language(s): Java
Project Management: Maven
Version Control: Git, GitHub, Bitbucket
Database: H2, Postgres, hsql
IDEs / Editors: Eclipse, VSCode
Other: trying to create my own little RAD framework (core-next.io), learned a lot about spring and some other cools stuff while doing it. Also digging into native macos apps using java (sounds weird huh? :-D, github.com/mojo2012/kakao).

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

We're setup twins! Though all these comments here have me wondering if the grass is greener on the IntelliJ / Gradle / Kotlin side of the fence...

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mojo2012 profile image
Matti

I tried intellij, so many times. I tell myself, just do what people tell you: go though the first 2 weeks and you never want to go back. Well I did that, I used it for more than 2 weeks and I still don't get it. It's so friggin buggy!
You know, I do almost everything with keyboard shortcuts. When using switching to to other apps and back suddenly the window focus is messed up. I hit cmd-w to close the active tab but something else in the background closes. That even happens with active windows (like the vcs view, which is a separate window).
There is no proper compile feedback, like in eclipse. Everything always looks good until you realize that although the app started, some code just doesn't work because it actually didn't compile properly.
It makes awesome statically typed java like a dynamic language (aka javascript hell).
There isn't even a autoformat and autoimport hook on save - that'S one of the most basic features at all!
You have to install a damn plugin that uses the eclipse formatter, what the heck.
Then why are there so many panels open, I constantly switch them, because I don't need all this crap and they just reappear all the time. Even the "do you want to buy the ultimate version???" message bubble. I already have that damn ultimate version you son of a ...
To sum it up: eclipse may be slow but it's still the way to go for me, because it supports me in most cases, whereas intellij is just like a text editor, not really an IDE to me.

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cjbrooks12 profile image
Casey Brooks

Language: Kotlin. Java only when I must (supporting older codebases). New code is pure Kotlin, even multiplatform if it makes sense

VCS: Git, GitHub, GitKraken

CI/CD: Azure Devops, GitHub Actions, Travis CI (though I'm trying to migrate those repos to GitHub Actions)

Build Tools: Gradle. Lots and lots of Gradle.

IDEs: Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate

Front End: Vuejs, though I'm using Kotlin/JS more and more

Back End: Ktor, Kotlin/JS serverless on Node

Other: project docs websites with Orchid

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

I guess I'm moving to Gradle and IntelliJ, haha! Does Kotlin have its own front-end? Is that what Kotlin/JS is?

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hleb profile image
Hleb

Language: Java

Project Management: Maven, Gradle

Version Control: Git, GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket

Database: MongoDB, H2, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch

IDEs / Editors: IntelliJ IDEA, some Vim

Front-End: don't work with FE last 5 years

Other: playing with GraalVM and Quarkus framework

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

How do you like GraalVM? Do you actually use it for polyglot programming? I want to play around with it, but it feels gimmicky

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hleb profile image
Hleb

Actually I didn't try it for polyglot things and mainly use with Java. It's interesting for me due to native-image feature (as Quarkus project too). Currently I'm trying it on my pet projects, not on production. But I want to figure out how can I use it with AWS Lambda functions with which I work on my job. Hope, it can help me with Lambda function cold start issue :)

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scottshipp profile image
scottshipp
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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Good ol' Apache Commons.

Failsafe looks interesting... could you explain that in a nutshell?

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robm99x profile image
Rob Mitchell

Language(s): Java, JavaScript, XML, XSL, JSON, bash

Project Management: Ant (yup, old school)

Version Control: GitLab

Database: PostgreSQL

IDEs / Editors: long time Eclipse user (VSCode pretty awesome too) and BBEdit (Mac OS-based)

Front-End: jQuery, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, JSP, XML/XSL

Other: requests come through custom, homegrown MVC framework, hits Java code, queries db, results transformed into XML, passed as request attribute to JSP, calls Java code to transform with XSL, producing more HTML and JS code, JSP converts to HTML, presented to browser. Ouch!

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jnunderwood profile image
John N Underwood • Edited

Language: Groovy

Build System: Gradle

Version Control: Git, GitLab

Database: H2, SQL Server

IDEs / Editors: Vim, VS Code, IntelliJ Idea

Front-End: JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, some Vue, interested in Svelte

Other: Grails for web applications and Micronaut for services, Docker, and Linux

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kamilolszewskinekken profile image
5unny • Edited

What is the deal with MongoDB these days? Why is it so popular? I know it is more scalable and faster, but what does it offer to you-developers? How would you compare your daily work on project between using any SQL like Postgres and Mongo? Don't get me wrong, I know something about it(I participate in great university.mongodb.com courses), but I do not see any advantages in switching to Mongo in small-scale applications, as it would take time to educate whole team and it changes nothing and even more I would have to sacrifice multidocument transactions. So what I am missing guys?

Anyway, my stack is below:
Language(s): Java, Kotlin
Project Management: Maven, Gradle (on Kotlin ones), NPM for frontend
Version Control: Git(GitLab), SVN(iF.SVNAdmin) for docs
Database: PostgreSQL+PostGIS, MariaDB, H2 in local envs, ElasticSearch for fulltext
IDEs / Editors: IntelliJ <3 (Eclipse before)
Back-end: Spring
Testing: JUnit5, Mockito, AssertJ + Sonar for static analysis
Front-End: Angular, JSF(JoinFaces+AdminFaces/PrimeFaces) if project is quick and team is inexperienced with SPAs
Hosted apps: YouTrack(task management), Rancher(containerized dev/test environments), GitLab CI(CI/CD), Artifactory(maven repo), PassBolt(in-team password management), MailDev/mailtrap.io (mocking smtp), ELK (log aggregation)

Other: Currently focusing on DDD and Spring Cloud microservices running on Kubernetes