Over some 15 years of Java coding, I came up with a lot of small utility functions to fill recurring needs in my programs.
In the java tradition, I collected most of them as static functions in classes named after their area of application.
I also created a few utility classes that are included in this library.
Most of the tools here were written in the context of database driven web application development. They will probably be most useful to you in a similar context.
Java 6 or higher is required. (Java 5 might work if you recompile the sources. I haven't tried it recently.)
Please see the Javadoc pages for detailed information.
You might find that some functions duplicate facilities that now exist as part of the standard library or Apache Common libraries. Please remember that I started collecting these functions in the days of Java 1.3 and that I had to keep most of them in the library for backward compatibility.
The functions I use the most are the ones in the Strings class.
They will allow you to transform, parse, convert, concatenate and replace parts of strings.
I also use a lot the functions in the Dates class, with their companion classes SimpleInputDateFormat, SimpleInputTimeFormat and SimpleInputTimestampFormat.
Please note that the Date class used in creating and manipulating dates is java.sql.Date and not java.util.Date. This library was created to be used in database driven applications.
The functions in Dates will allow you to parse, check the formatting and extract partial information from dates, times and timestamps (as represented by the Date, Time and Timestamp classes in the java.sql package).
Those two classes allow you to parse and print currency values.
The Pair class is a trivial implementation of the pair data structure.
The Email class is is a wrapper around org.apache.commons.mail.HtmlEmail. It's intent is to make it quick and easy to send HTML emails from a web application. The class can be used as is or subclassed. I often do the latter.
EmailValidator allows basic validation of email address format.
HTMLText contains function to manipulate text in an HTML/web application context.
It mostly contains function to manipulate or convert unicode characters, HTML entities and accented letters, and escape some HTML constructs.
The Images class contains function to manipulate and resize images.
The Files class contains function to manipulate file name (mostly to manage file extensions).
The json subpackage contains classes that can be used to represent a JSON document.
The base class is JsonObject. Once you have created a JsonObject, you can add subobjects of the different types to it to compose your document. Once this is done, you can call the print() function on the JsonObject to create the JSON string representation.
I'll add some code examples in the future.
I'm also planning to create a JSON parser that will produce JsonObjects. At that point, I might spin off the json classes into their own library.
This library is used in the following projects:
- dbbeans-sql: a wrapper library around JDBC, best used with lambdas in Java 8 but will work with Java 6+ and inner classes (full documentation coming soon, Javadoc available here);
- html-codegen: a Java library to generate HTML code;
- java-codegen: a Java library to generate Java code;
- Beanmaker: a Java library and framework to generate Java code in relation with a relational database; this project uses all the above libraries;
- CMSAlpha: CMS (Content Management System), for use by professional wed designers and web application developers, based on Servlets, JSP and the above libraries; GitHub repository coming soon.