Java Reference
In-Depth Information
rary is code you call. It is roughly the difference between building a car by buying a car al-
most complete but with no engine, and building a car by buying all the pieces and bolting
them together yourself.
When considering using a third-party framework, there are many choices and issues to con-
sider. One is cost, which gets into the issue of open source versus closed source. Most “open
source” tools can be downloaded for free and used, either without any conditions or with
conditions that you must comply with. There is not the space here to discuss these licensing
issues, so I will refer you to
Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing
(O'Reilly).
Some well-known collections of open source frameworks and libraries for Java are listed in
Table 1-3
. Most of the projects on these sites are “curated”—that is, judged and found
worthy—by some sort of community process.
Table 1-3. Reputable open source Java collections
Organization
URL
Notes
Apache Software Foundation
http://projects.apache.org
Not just a web server!
Spring framework
JBoss community
http://www.jboss.org/projects
Not just a Java EE app server!
There are also a variety of open source code repositories, which are not curated—anybody
who signs up can create a project there, regardless of the existing community size (if any).
Sites like this that are successful accumulate too many projects to have a single page listing
them—you have to search. Most are not specific to Java.
Table 1-4
shows some of the open
source code repos.
