In the process of working on some miscellaneous Java projects I noticed this guava jar.
Today I did a google search on it and low and behold it’s a Google Java library of assorted functionality.
I have passing familiarity with Apache’s common libraries but I had never heard of Guava. I wonder if this is because my ignorance or because it’s not a hugely known product.
I took a peek and what I saw warranted future exploration. As I began the exploration I was initially excited and thought the library would be very useful. Further into the API I began to lose the enthusiasm and began to doubt the library’s usefulness to me.
One glaring issue for me was handling of big and little endian in terms of byte arrays and conversion to primitives. I need support for both but what I found in the library was hit and miss depending on the particular class.
In the end it seems the collections are good. Also the base stuff has some interesting things that could be useful like more string functionality. Overall it’s interesting but not that useful to me.
