GitHub is a platform that allows us to share, collaborate, review, clone projects of the people all over the globe. We can create our own GitHub repository and invite enthusiastic and dedicated developers from the world to collaborate with us, assist us with their suggestions and recommend innovative ideas. Similarly, we can add repositories of our projects so that the learners may use it as a source of information and try to incorporate the features used in their own projects.
It also provides us with chat-rooms, so that we can connect to the developer and seek his help if we encounter any errors while cloning a project or by using any of its features. While initiating a project, we always need a reference, so that we acquire knowledge about the implementation of the trending technologies. Generally, for Java or Android developers who are not enrolled in any course, have a very limited source for references, they can conveniently take help from the projects available on GitHub.
Let’s go through the top eight Java/Android projects that are available on Github:
iluwatar/java-design-patterns: This project is a collection of the Java design patterns which are available with the description, usability, and source code along with the commands to increase the understandability. Designing is a very redundant process when it comes to developing software, superior design is always appreciated, but there are many developers who are not creative enough to design adequately. This project is a blessing for them as they can learn to create new design patterns with the help of this Java project.
Before trying to build this project, there are certain pre-requisites, you need to have the knowledge about the basic software designing principles and you should be familiar with the various software designing models. It is recommended that the user begins with technologies like KISS, or YAGNI so that the user is already familiar with the basis of the project. If the user wants to create any specific design that is out of the scope of this project, he can request the collaborator to include it through Git Chat.
The link to the project is given here.
spring-projects/spring-boot: The demand for Spring boot is highly increasing these days, as it a faster as well as a convenient way for spring development. As the Demands of the developers are not just limited to the default options, there is always a need for the development of customised software. This project provides us a variety of non-functional components that are usually redundant in the development process. This helps to eliminate the need for code generation and XML configuration.
This project will help us in building an application, running it, and including some custom services and functionalities. It enables us to build REST APIs and server configuration. With the increasing congestion, there is a dire need for optimisation of APIs. The minimisation of API calls reduces the congestion at the server and overall run time if the developed application.This project provides a lot of Spring Libraries along with their proper syntax and functions.It is a very informative and working reference for candidates who wish to learn Spring booting.
ReactiveX/RxJava: The Java Virtua Machine implementation of Reactive Extension Is known as RxJava.We can make use of observable links to compose asynchronous and event-based Softwares with the help of this library. This eliminates the fuss of maintaining the synchronous programme. The observer pattern is the basis for event handling in RxJava.The latest version of RxJva is Version 3. It eliminates all the API bugs that were witnessed in RxJava 2. The RxJava3 doesn’t consider the concurrency among the data structures that have been used as well.
It is completely event-based and abstract to synchronous components of the programme. The project contains complete documentation about the libraries that are available and their functionalities. The terminologies, Background components, schedulers, parallel processing techniques, continuity strategies are also explained in detail. “emission”, “emits”, “item”, “event”,” signal”, “data” and “message” are used to explain and track the movement of the object in motion and are treated as synonyms. The assembly time, run time, and subscription time, all are taken into account to maintain the data flow record.
Google/guava: Google has introduced a new set of core Java Libraries that consists of unique collection variants like graph libraries, input-output management, tools for concurrency, immutable collections, multimaps and multisets, hashing techniques, caching methods, string handling methods and many more functions. It stands out the highest used Java project with Google and many more reputed companies.
It is compatible with Android as well. The Android Guava source is available in the android directory. Currently, there are two flavours of Guava available in the market: The JRE flavour requires JDK with minimum version 1.8. Use the Android flavour in case you need support for JDK 1.7 or Android. The project contains a detailed study of all the warnings that you can encounter while setting up Guava. You can easily deal with them if you follow the available guidelines.
Google/material-design-icons: Google has introduced the material design icons library that contains a variety of icons that are compatible with the material design dependencies of Android. This library was introduced specifically for the developers who are using the UI-objects from the material library set in order to eliminate the compatibility issue existing between the objects and the icons and image assets used by the user. This saves the time that the developer spared on designing or hunting the icon previously. And increases the interactivity and coherency of the user interface and reduces the space complexity issues faced in designing.
wasabeef/awesome-android-ui: This library contains a curated list of UI/UX design tools, that are maintained in an active manner with the help of an alphabetic list. A variety of tools dealing with Networking, Image Loader, Drawable, Dependency Injections, O/R Mapping, NoSQL, Pub/Sub, Logger, Background Processing, Fonts, Video, Parcelables, Functional Programming, Social Networks, WebRTC, ImageProcessing, Camera, Security, Media, Showcases, Maps, etc are available in this library.
This helps the user in designing dynamic application pages that draw significant user attention. This tool is very helpful for learning Networking concepts as well. Generally, for building applications for mobile games or tutor, a dynamic UI necessary, and a difficult task, using this library help us build better UIs with a lesser effort from the developer’s end.
BLANKJ/ANDROIDUTILCODE: It is a very significant tool that is compatible with the Android Studio. This library encapsulates the functions that commonly used in Android development which have a complete demo and unit test. By implementing the encapsulated APIs, you can enhance the development speed significantly. The programme mainly consists of two modules which are util codes, that are popularly included in software development and sub utils, that are not used very often but constitute an important part of the main code for some applications. It contains a complete understanding of the different layers associated with utils and sub utils and has reference images also. Its documentation contains the util code as well as the sub until code. You don’t need to have any prior knowledge other than Android SDK experience to work with this library.
SQUARE/OKHTTP: HTTP is the contemporary way of establishing a network connection. It significantly reduces the length of the bandwidth and allows more clients to connect to a particular server and provides high-speed data transfer and acknowledgement along with a significant reduction in the amount of congestion.OkHttp is an HTTP client that is really efficient for API optimisation and reducing the space complexity issues.
There are some in-built functionalities of this library: HTTP/2 support enables all the requests that have a common host to function via a common socket. Connection pooling reduces the delay in request acknowledgement. Transparent GZIP is a tool that helps in compressing the size of the downloaded files. Response caching avoids the seriousness of repeating the same network operations. OkHttp perseveres the instances at which some bugs are encountered: it smoothly resolves the popular connection issues on its own, without any assistance from the developer.
Its response API supports frequent build and serves immutable. It deals with both synchronous as well as asynchronous calls.
Using OkHttp is simple, feasible and resolves most of the common issues faced by back-end developers.
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By Vanshika Singolia
