Java Frameworks

 

Java frameworks

What Are Java Frameworks?

A framework is a set of pre-written code, which a developer can then use and reuse as a foundation to create a customized application by inheriting it in their code as needed to get the app to work. The reuse of frameworks enables developers to program their applications without the manual overhead of creating every line of code from scratch. 
A Java framework is used as a foundation and platform for developing software applications. Java frameworks include predefined classes and functions which may be abstract in nature, which are used to manage the hardware interaction and manage the customized java tools.

Best Java Frameworks

Every framework has its own benefits, we cannot judge whether the framework is good or bad. Some frameworks are used to build customized frontend and some are used to build customized backend. There are many frameworks built on Java, here are some very commonly used frameworks by the developers.

1. Spring

The Spring Framework is probably the most well-known and fastest developing open source Java framework. Spring Framework is a powerful lightweight application development framework used for Enterprise Java. It allows the developers to build loosely coupled modules where-in dependencies are handled by the framework rather than depending on the libraries and also helps to build web services, and microservices.

Spring Object-Relational Mapping (Spring ORM). Spring Web Flow, and Spring Web MVC. Spring framework is embedded with some modules like Spring Core Module, Spring AOP Module, Spring ORM Module, Spring Web MVC Module.

Uses :

• Web application development
• Its also used in Enterprise Java (JEE)

2. Hibernate

Hibernate is a stable object-relational mapping framework that establishes a communication between Java and relational database management systems (RDBMSs). It implements Java Persistence API (JPA). Hibernate is a database for java applications it is an Object Relational-Mapping (ORM) database . The queries in Hibernate are called Hibernate Query Language (HQL).

Object oriented languages and RDBMSs handle data differently, which can lead to mis-match problems. This mis-match problem is caused because, as the object oriented languages structure data as a hierarchy of objects whereas relational databases represent data in a tabular format. Hibernate solves the problem of mismatching in java. It maps database tables directly to the java objects.

Advantages of Hibernate Framework

1. Fast Performance

2. Database Independent Query

3) Automatic Table Creation

4) Simplifies Complex Join

5) Provides Query Statistics and Database Status

3. Dropwizard

Dropwizard is a open-source framework that helps the developers to build RESTful APIs. It combines all the important dependencies like Jersey into a single package.The RESTful APIs built using Dropwizard are stable and gives high performance.

If the developer is not using Dropwizard the he/she has to import and bind all the mature and stable dependencies like Jetty, Jersey, Guava and Metrics. So this problem is solved by Dropwizard it brings together all the important dependencies together and provide a developer free ecosystem to access those dependencies.

All the important things like security, database integration and connectivuty are taken care by Dropwizard the developer has to only apply logic to build customized applications.

4. JSF (Java Server Faces)

Java Server Faces (JSF) is a web application framework based on java. JSF follow MVC based architecture and helps in creating reusable UI components for server based applications. Jsf connects UI components with the data sources. It also provides API to build UI components. And the Ui components developed using JSF are completely reusable. The aim of JSf combine various frontend technologies like CSS, JavaScript, and HTML which helps in creating customized UI components.

JSF is quite similar to Struts. JSF can be directly integrated with AJAX

5. Grails

Grails is a web application development framework . It is written in Groovy programming language, it runs on Java platform and is perfectly compatible with Java syntax. This framework is based on the MVC design pattern.

Groovy is similar to Java which some more features added when compared to Java. It is very easy to learn Groovy if you already know Java.

Similar to JSP, in Grails, the rendering technology is GSP (Groovy Server Pages). Creating tags for the View in Grails is simple and easy. It also uses GORM which as you might have guessed is the ORM implementation used in Grails. You can also directly use Hibernate instead of GORM. Grails has built-in support for RESTful APIs thus making it easy to create such services.

You can integrate your existing java code with Grails. If you have a mix of Groovy and Java code in your application.

6. ATG

ATG is a java based web framework used to build E-Commerce applications. It provides many inbuilt features that sets up a well architectured base for building complex and secured e-commerce web applications.

ATG platform is capable to run on Oracle WebLogic, IBM Websphere, and JBoss.

7. Play

Play is a both web and mobile framework. It is an open-source application framework which mainly follows the model view controller (MVC) architecture.

Play is similar to Django or Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET architecture and doesn’t necessarily follow J2EE web standards.

The applications becomes scalable because of it’s non-blocking and stateless architecture. It has an RESTful APi architecture along with Websockets and JSOn support

8. Spark

Spark is an open-source web development framework which has similar features as Spring and Play , but it is more powerful and doesn’t follow the traditional MVC design pattern.

The setup and configuration is not so complex. It is faster than Hadoop in terms of data processing because of its computation. We can call this framework as a complete dynamic as it provides real-time data processing.

It is also easy to integrate with some data science tools like Scala and R. The main of this framework is processing large amount of data and also supports advanced analytics with SQL queries, machine learning and graph algorithms.

9. Vert.X

Vert.x is an application framework that has functionalities of languages like Java, Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, . It is thus polyglot in nature. It helps in non-blockinf of applications and overcomes the use of multithreading.

Vert.x can be said as more of a toolkit that provides APIs in multiple languages to perform asynchronous tasks that all the web applications need, authentication, monitoring, DB connectivity etc.

The web applications gives high performance because of non-blocking nature of Vert.x. The framework can be used for any application like small, medium or large-scale. The Vert.X provides all the features same as Node.js which helps in API layering.

10. MyBatis

MyBatis is an open source framework which optimizes the database access time in Java applications. It can be used as replacement of JDBC and Hibernate. It makes the task of SQl database mapping with java objects easy.

MyBatis is performs well as compared JDBC and Hibernate. MyBatis can dynamically generate SQL statements . It also performs query caching for making database accessibility easy.

MyBatis is a good alternative to Hibernate and JDBC when your application is not too complex and you want simple features like database connectivity, loading the database driver, managing and releasing connections are done by the framework. MyBatis is so flexible that it can be directly integrated with the Spring framework easily.

11. Apache Mina

Apache Mina is a network application framework with which developers can create highly scalable and high performance network applications easily. Mina provides high-level and low-level API layers for building a TCP Server and FTP Server. Mina is good at handling input output operations. It can be directly integrated with frameworks like Spring which is a great feature .

Features

• Provides API for various transport types.
• Filter interface as an extension point.
• Low-level and high-level API.
• Highly customizable thread model.

Conclusion

There are many other frameworks in the market for web development or enterprise development. One can choose frameworks based on its flexibility, community support, speed and its interactive nature with the frontend or the database. But one has to keep in mind that the framework should provide some important features like database connectivity and all.