Super Java

June 11, 2012 6:48 PM

What are your favorite instances of beautiful, clever, useful, elegant, or neat-o Java from around the web?

I'm learning Java, and would love some inspiration. What makes a given Java app good? What makes it wowee-that's-some-cool-Java?

posted by pH Indicating Socks to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Sadly, it's not open source, but Minecraft is written in Java.

Open/Libre Office are written in Java.

What makes an app good would be the same as what makes an app good in any language, really. Are you asking for examples of Java code that's idiomatically Java-ish that's also good/elegant code that would be less good/elegant without the idiomatic Java?
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 6:55 PM on June 11, 2012

Eclipse is written in Java, and it's popular with Java developers as a tool for programming in Java.

Processing is written in Java, translates to Java, and interoperates with Java. The demos and code samples show what makes it good pretty clearly. Here's a tutorial on creating Processing projects in Eclipse.

Playing around with Processing would be a fun exercise for a relative beginner who wants some 'wow' factor really quickly without losing sight of the goal of being a Java developer.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 9:59 PM on June 11, 2012

I don't really know any examples of beautiful Java, but please don't use the OpenOffice codebase as an example. It's a very useful program, but the code itself is very crufty.
posted by vasi at 10:02 PM on June 11, 2012

Java's nice because it has a large and mature ecosystem of 3rd party libraries, coupled with great performance (if you work for it ;) and good portability.

Look for best of breed libraries like fastutil, GlazedLists, jetty, or MiG layout.

Good open source libraries like these can help get a project going while simultaneously teaching you how to write reusable, high-performance code. Double win.
posted by kickback at 10:07 PM on June 11, 2012