Almost 30 years and still Ruling the software industry, over the years Java has ranked among the top three most popular programming languages in the world with numerous applications, including back-end development projects, big data and machine learning projects, and obviously, web and Android development. If you are a developer and searching for tools that help you develop software solutions easier, faster, and better, then don’t worry; Java is always there for you with a large number of frameworks that can provide you with the best solutions for any domain, like web development, app development, cloud computing, machine learning, big data, IT, and more.
The basic principle of a framework is to “break the wheel” and make developers’ lives easier by helping them focus on business logic rather than worrying about common pieces of code. Frameworks come with a set of prewritten code that you can append to your own to create custom solutions to problems by calling its methods, inheritance, listeners, or other implementations of the patterns. Now, if you want to build your next project in Java, then you should use a proper Java web framework. But are you confused about choosing the right one? then this article will clear all your doubts by giving you a list of the most popular Java web frameworks for web development.
What is an Open Source Java Framework?
The Java Framework is a collection of pre-written programs used by Java developers to create Java web applications that are open-sourced meaning their source code is publicly visible and anyone can contribute to its improvement. It serves as a template that a developer can utilize to create a software application and Java program. The Framework enables developers to construct an application program without having to manually refer to each line of code from scratch. It offers predefined functions and classes for inputting, managing, and processing hardware devices, as well as communicating with system applications. This process is determined by the framework, the application used to generate output based on your preferences.
Top 5 Open Source Java Frameworks in 2024
Now that we’ve defined a Java open-source framework, let’s have a look at the most popular Java frameworks in the industry. These open-source frameworks not only facilitate and accelerate development, but also require the use of best practices for building enterprise Java applications and desktop applications.Let’s have a deeper look at the top five Open Source Java frameworks.
1. Spring
Spring is the true leader of the Java frameworks, which makes Java quicker, easier, and safer to use. Spring is trendy for its speed, simplicity, and productivity, which help Java developers create enterprise-level web and mobile applications with complete ease. Spring makes Java modern, reactive, and cloud-ready, which makes it the world’s most popular Java framework. Spring MVC and Spring Boot are very popular among developers to build high-performance, complex web applications. If you are a Java developer, then you should know of Spring. Spring is used by many tech giants, including Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and more. Build almost any application imaginable using Spring’s flexible and comprehensive set of extensions and third-party libraries,
- Safely deploy entire microservices based architectures into the cloud, in record time using combined Spring Boot with Spring Cloud’s rich set of supporting libraries, servers, patterns, and templates.
- Start a new Spring project in seconds, Spring deeply cares about performance with, fast startup, fast shutdown, and optimized execution by default.
- It has a track record of dealing with security issues quickly and responsibly. Continuously tested and reported vulnerabilities and also monitored third-party dependencies very closely. Provides regular updates to keep your data and applications as safe as possible.
- It has an enormous, global, diverse community to help you anytime with resources quickstarts, guides, videos, meetups, support, or even formal training and certification to get you to the next level.
2. Google Web Toolkit
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open-source Java framework developed by Google and used by thousands of developers worldwide for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications. This framework is used for the productive development of high-performance web applications and client-side development like Javascript with less knowledge in JavaScript because it converts Java code into JavaScript code which is a very useful feature of GWT. Popular Google products like AdSense, Google Wallet, and AdWords are written using this framework extensively.
- GWT contains powerful tools for creating optimized web applications.
- Compiles Java source code into optimized, stand-alone JavaScript files that run on all major browsers including Android and iPhone mobile browsers also.
- Easy to make beautiful UIs with little knowledge of front-end scripting languages to focus on business logic and increase productivity.
- Compatible with Eclipse IDE, Maven, and JUnit.
- Extensive widget libraries allow you to write AJAX applications in Java.
- Debug AJAX applications easily in your favorite IDE.
3. Hibernate
Hibernate is a stable, open-source object-relational mapping(ORM) Java framework that easily communicates with any database incredibly and is very convenient when working with multiple databases. It is a lightweight Java ORM, used to overcome the several limitations of JDBC, and is very helpful If you’re always working with relational databases. Working with Hibernate is very easy and fun using the APIs and the query language. It also has several useful tools like Mapping Editor, Wizards, and Reverse Engineering which makes working with Hibernate more pleasant. A large number of big companies use Hibernate in their tech stacks, including Platform, DAILY HOTEL, IBM, and Dell.
- It is very lightweight and easy to scale, modify, and configure.
- Low risk of data loss and capable of manipulating complex and strong data with less coding.
- Perfect for OOP-type projects that require high productivity and portability at the same time.
- Specially developed for RDBMS but the latest version supports the NoSQL database also.
- Awesome Command-line tools and IDE plugins to make your experience easier and more pleasant.
4. Struts
Apache Struts is a free, open-source, MVC framework for creating elegant and modern enterprise-level Java web applications. It favors convention over configuration and helps to reduce overall development time by successfully organizing Java, JSP, and Action classes. This framework ships with plugins to support REST, AJAX, and JSON and can be easily integrated with other Java frameworks like Spring plugin for dependency injection and Hibernate plugin for object-relational mapping.
- Flexible and easy to use and is based on an MVC design pattern.
- Integrates with other Java technologies via plugins and works well with REST, JSON, and AJAX.
- Supports creative themes and templates and completes development tasks faster using struts.
- Bring what you’re already working with and extend capabilities to those already in Struts.
- Drastically reduced development effort and time required, allowing you to make more applications rapidly.
5. Play
Play is a solid open-source framework for Java web development and one of the top Java REST API frameworks. This Java web development framework includes type-safe RESTful Web Services (written in Scala) and a web profiler, as well as web and application servers. Scala, a programming language, facilitates development.Play is built on Akka that provides predictable and minimal resource consumption for highly scalable applications. Key features of Play are:
- Play is a versatile, pluggable, and customizable tool.
- It can handle faults in dev mode, including build errors and runtime.
- It enhances efficiency through code reloading.
- It offers good support for a variety of microservices patterns.
- The key advantages are rapid speed, strong scalability, and exceptional quality.
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Conclusion
Java frameworks are like the best friend of developers which makes their task easy and fast.Java is a fairly rich language, with many free source web frameworks accessible. It’s typically a good idea to conduct some Googling before deciding on a web framework for development. After reading this article now you can choose the most suitable one depending upon your project requirements. Here I tried to list the most promising and useful frameworks but there are also some brilliant Java frameworks available in the market and among them, some honorable mentions are Grails,Vaadin, Spark, and Blade.
FAQs
What’s an open-source Java framework?
Java Framework is a collection of pre-written programs used by Java developers to create Java web applications that are open-sourced, meaning their source code is publicly visible and anyone can contribute to its improvement.
Why to use Java frameworks?
Open-source Java frameworks increase the efficiency of development. They let us build faster, pay less, customize freely, and take assistance from a massive community.
What are the top 5 Java frameworks?
Spring, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Hibernate, Struts, and Play are the top 5 open-source Java frameworks.