The IT industry, especially in India, heavily uses Java in most of their projects. Being a Java developer, one should have the knowledge about the Java-based tools and technologies used by the most of the IT industries such as
Android application development, Web Development
, etc. Because of this reason, this article focuses mainly on the Java tools and technologies used in different fields.
Classification of Java Tools/Technologies Based on Different Fields
1. Web Development
Web development refers to the development of a website(collection of web pages) or a web application(collection of smaller apps/modules..similar to a website). For example:- The site you are currently viewing is a website.
Server Side Technologies
To collect the data from the frontend and then give it to the logic layer and after processing giving back the response to the frontend is the work of the backend. This comes under server-side technologies.
- Spring Framework This framework provides a way to develop a scalable web application using MVC(model-view-controller) architecture. Around 60% of IT industries use Spring. Spring also provides standard security measures.
- Spring Boot Spring boot is the most used framework which reduces the headache of doing all the configuration like that in Spring.
- Grails It is a rapid application development framework built on top of Spring. It provides some advantages of spring and rapid development environment of groovy to the user. Also, it has outstanding community support.
Java Application servers
The server is basically a system that processes the HTTP requests(example:-www.geeksforgeeks.com) and returns a response(can be a web page or data). Some of the most famous local servers used with Java frameworks are given below:-
- Tomcat Tomcat is the most popular Java application server. There is a Java standard for a Web Application Archive file – aka WAR file. These are deployed to Application servers such as Tomcat to provide the run time environment for your web application. Also, Java applications can be deployed on the cloud as well.
2. Android Application
Android applications are .apk applications which run on Android devices. More and more devices are having Android kernel nowadays. So, it is also a good career option.
IDEs/Tools for Android application development
Following are some tools which provide rich interfaces for android application development.
- Android Studio It has really brought a revolution in the world of Android development. With its features for debugging, testing and drag and drop option for frontend it is widely used today within a large community.
- Eclipse It is one of the most famous IDE(integrated development environment) to work on Java based technologies. It has wide support of plugins for various activities including Android development.
- AVD Manager AVD Manager is an Android emulator.
- IntelliJ IDEA Just like Eclipse and Netbeans, it is also a very famous Java Development Tool.
3. Big Data
As the data is growing day by day, the appropriate handling of data has become necessary for every organization. Be it training the statistical model or anything else, handling big data isn’t easy and hence requires some tools for the same. Some of them are given below.
Tools for big data
Just like Python, Java also provides some incredible tools for Big data analytics.
- HADOOP It is an open source tool built over Java and is used for storing and processing large data. It is very widely used today.
- Spark Spark is used to stream huge data and distribute batch.
- Kafka Kafka is used for queueing large volumes of information.
- Cassandra Cassandra is used for querying and storing Big/huge Data.
- Spring Boot Spring Boot is used to provide the system’s options to the customers via REST API. Although it is a backend framework, it can be combined with other tools for big data analysis.
- Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is used to store and query bulk volumes of information.
4. DevOps
Java DevOps is simply following the DevOps practices and philosophies for Java app development to obtain better and rapid development. Some of the procedures you should know are:
- Continuous integration In this process, an updated version of the code is integrated at some particular interval(for example:- In sprints in agile methodology). UAT and build follows after each version and hence bugs are removed at particular stages and hence code remains clean and bug-free.
- Continuous delivery So after the code is integrated and tested, it needs to be built and deployed on the production from the development stage.
- Microservices Instead of bigger applications, the whole application can be made up of smaller applications. For example- Let’s say we are building a web application. Then it can be made of many loosely coupled, easily independently deployable parts. Eg- web app following MVC architecture.
- Infrastructure as a code It simply means to use the code to auto process many things. This kind of code is usually deployed on the cloud and is executed automatically sometimes. For example, some tools can be used to install other software by automating the installation process.
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Tools for Devops
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- Jenkins Jenkins allows performing the repeated steps. It allows the maintenance of a chain-cycle in which different processes can be defined. Using this, the process of integration and build can be automated. DevOps teams to integrate project changes more easily and access outputs for quickly identifying problems.
- Visual Studio IDE This Microsoft based IDE has some features which allow synchronizing with the version control system sites like Github etc. It also allows the deployment on the cloud like Azure etc.
- Docker and Kubernetes These are the trending tools today. Docker is a container which resolves the dependency issue. It enables to create a virtual environment. The best thing about Kubernetes is that it has totally consumed the Docker and also it can automatically scale the number of servers according to the traffic.
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5. Desktop Applications
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Tools for Desktop application development
- Following tools/technology/features can be used to build Desktop applications using Java. These are packages in Java that can be imported and used easily.
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- Swing
- AWT
- JavaFX
- All these libraries can be used to create GUI and desktop tools. One
- advantage
- of Java is that it consumes lesser space.
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6. Others
- Other than all the Java Tools/Technologies provided above, Java is also used in many applications.
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- Independent applications, runnable jars can always be created with it for the various needs.
- Mostly all the popular APIs and services like those provided by AWS/AZURE/GCP provides SDK in Java.
- Various IBM tools used by IT industry requires Java as well.
- Kotlin is a Java-based language and is also gaining more familiarity with Java developers.