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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!

Latest comments (57)

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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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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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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

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_hs_ profile image
HS

Language: Java; Scala and Groovy for personal fun
IDE: IntelliJ + VS Code sometimes nano or VI if I can't help it
Build tool: Gradle
Framework: Micronaut; before it was Spring
DB: Azure CosmosDB, before it was MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB,

Mostly I used REST but currently I need to manage multiple sides so WebSockets, SSE and message driven + serverless

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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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erikpischel profile image
Erik Pischel

Language(s): Java

build system: gradle

Version Control: Git, company hosted GitLab

Database: Oracle

IDEs / Editors: Eclipse, emacs (mainly as git client "magit" , and org-mode), occassionally notepad++

Front-End: legacy: plain old JSPs; more recent: Angular, Vaadin

server-side: legacy: weblogic, more recent: spring boot

CI: jenkins

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

What's Javalin? I'm not sure I've heard of that one before

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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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johnson_cor profile image
Corey Johnson

I do Android dev mostly so:

Language(s): Kotlin, Java, XML

Project Management: Jira, Trello

Version Control: Git, GitHub

Database: MySQL (using room in Android)

IDEs / Editors: Android Studio and Sublime Text

Front-End: Mostly using xml for defining layouts in Android

Right now I'm trying to learn more about web development; which is really tough. It seems like there are always hundreds of correct solutions for any problem I'm trying to solve during web development!

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

I haven't had the pleasure of working with Jira yet, though I suspect I won't avoid it forever.

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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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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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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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joeclarkphd profile image
Joseph Clark

As a new Java developer (5 months now) I've been working on a model or starter Spring Boot web app aimed at long-term maintainability. (here: github.com/joeclark-phd/granite) I'm honing in on a toolkit that I like.

IDE: IntelliJ (free edition for now)

Languages: Java 8 (I expect to upgrade to 11 soon), and of course HTML/CSS/Javascript

Database: PostgreSQL

Framework: Spring Boot

Front-end: Thymeleaf templates with Bootstrap 4, JQuery

Dependency management: Maven + WebJars (the latter for JQuery, Bootstrap, etc.)

Build tools: Maven, Docker

Testing: JUnit 5, Testcontainers

I have a pretty good build process at this point which uses Testcontainers to spin up temporary Postgres databases as Docker containers during the 'test' phase for true integration testing, then builds and publishes images of the app and the database to Docker Hub in the 'deploy' phase. Still got some bugs to work out though.

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

That testing framework with Testcontainers sounds awesome, I would love to read an article about your setup!

 
awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Do you ever run into problems with lack of support for Gradle? Maven is ubiquitous so I've never had a problem with a library missing or anything. Is it easy enough to use with Spring?

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dhrubo55 profile image
Dhrubo Hasan

Language(s): Java

Version Control: Git, BitBucket, GitKracken

Database: postgres

IDEs / Editors: IntelliJ IDEA

Front-End: Vue JS

Other: JS

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Ooh, what's GitKracken?

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cjbrooks12 profile image
Casey Brooks

GitKraken is amazing! Easily the best Git GUI I've ever used.

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

It looks really neat! I'll have to play around with it. Thanks for the recommendation!