Utility projects under Apache Commons
I was wondering why people do not use these Utility projects from Apache. Probably I have seen 1-2 projects which utilize org.apache.commons.beanutils. Even I was not using these until 2006-2007. In any application which is in Test or Prod I see ‘NullPointerExceptions’ at least once. So what is the problem we write all these boiler code to check for NULL then call some function on it like trim(), length, size() or any public methods. Sometimes we miss first NULL check and I have seen myself missing these repeatedly before I started using Apache Common Utility methods. Now I make use of these utility classes very often which are ‘Null safe’ and protects my code from any ‘Null Pointers’. Here are some of the Utility projects I use on daily basis and recommend any one to use these if you are not using these already.
BeanUtils MethodUtils
ArrayUtils DataUtils DataFormatUtils ObjectUtils StringUtils
This has many classes useful on operating on Collections.
I am sure many people who often involve with open source projects use these on regular basis.
