Google Guava
| Company type | Open-source software |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software development |
| Founder | Kevin Bourrillion, Jared Levy |
| Products | Java libraries |
| Parent |
Google Guava is a collection of open-source libraries designed for the Java platform, mainly created by engineers at Google.
Overview
The Guava library is composed of three primary segments: fundamental utilities that streamline everyday programming tasks; an enhancement to the Java collections framework (JCF), initially named the Google Collections Library; and a set of supplementary utilities that provide capabilities such as functional programming, graph structures, caching mechanisms, range representations, and hashing functions.
This collections extension was developed to take advantage of the generics feature introduced with JDK 1.5. Although generics improved developer efficiency, the standard JCF did not offer advanced features, and existing alternatives like Apache Commons Collections had not incorporated generics in order to maintain backward compatibility. To address this deficiency, Google engineers Kevin Bourrillion and Jared Levy created a generic extension including classes like multisets, multimaps, bitmaps, and immutable collection types.
The architecture of Guava was influenced by prominent figures such as Joshua Bloch, the original architect of the Java Collections framework, and Doug Lea, a significant contributor to Java's concurrency utilities.
By April 2012, Guava was ranked as the 12th most widely used Java library, sharing prominence with Apache Commons projects. Additionally, a 2013 analysis of 10,000 GitHub repositories listed Google’s libraries—including Guava and Google Web Toolkit—among seven of the top 100 Java libraries, with Guava achieving eighth place in terms of popularity.
See also
- Apache Commons, a popular suite of Java utility libraries
- Google Guice, Google's dependency injection framework for Java