Being one of the oldest and widest used programming languages, Java is being considered for all scale industries from small to medium to large and that’s why companies like Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, and many others are still relying on this “old school” Java Programming Language. Its nature of being robust, versatile, and highly scalable has made it possible for programmers to explore the capabilities and also prevents developers to start coding right from the scratch.
Talking about the frameworks here makes wonders that possibly you wouldn’t have even imagined. However, the point here is, “What makes it so special and what possible changes does it brings when implemented in any programming language?” We will try to understand this with two basic questions.
What is a Framework?
Let’s say you want to build an application and in the mid of the project something clicked in your mind (maybe some fascinating unique feature), and now you want to add this to your project. So, that scope of change can be achieved using “Framework” and will save your time from re-building the whole code structure. Thus, frameworks are built on the top of the programming language.
Why is it required to have a Framework?
As we’re growing with the pace of technology, there are possibilities that you might want to make certain changes, and add some entities as per the complexity of the project. Therefore, at that point in time, we will be required something that can change the whole ecosystem by adjoining in the programming language. In other words, the framework will ensure the durability of the application/project.
By now, you must have understood the basic concept of a framework, now we will be moving forward to discuss some of the best frameworks to learn in java for full-stack developers in today’s competitive market.
7 Best Frameworks For Full Stack Java Developers To Learn
1. Spring
One of the best frameworks to work on java is definitely spring. Many of us will not wonder the reason behind it, you know why? Spring is also known as the framework of frameworks reason being it carries an absolute lightweight yet it’s a very powerful tool that supports hibernate, struts, JSF, etc. Rod Johnson who also released the publication of his book in 2002 Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development, first introduced spring v1.0 in 2004. It also offers technologies that include Aspect-oriented Programming (AOP), Dependency Injection (DI), and Plain Old Java Object (POJO). Not just this, spring also acts like a base for spring boot, spring cloud, and spring GraphQL. This is what makes it so popular and demanding among full-stack developers. Besides these, certain other features should be looked into before going for the same.
- This framework does provide an abstraction mechanism in java programming that enables developers to work with local, global and nested transactions.
- Within the spring framework, a developer can easily create applications on MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, and later they can make changes as per their requirement.
- You must be aware of the “testing” part in the development and to cope with that spring testing is way too simple that supports some of the prominent components like “Mock Objects, TestContext Framework, Spring MVC Test”, etc
- To manage objects in Java programming, Inversion of Control (IoC) is being used which is responsible for handling the lifespan (lifecycle) of any defined object.
2. React
Whenever we talk about web development, React is the name that comes up to mind instantly. The reason is, that it offers a vast number of extensions for the structural or architectural support of an application on which you’re working. Some of the best ones are React Native, Flux, and so on. The sole purpose of using react is its simplicity, yes, it’s very easy to get hands-on with it just by having less knowledge of JavaScript and HTML. The best part about react is you can use it for developing both mobile and web applications where React Native is solely being used to craft elegant mobile applications and as per stats there are about 15% of applications that are built with React Native (stats of the USA). Besides this, Facebook (now known as Meta) first introduced React in 2013. Now, this is promising to get the best hands-on for front-end development, but you need to know some specifics about React before jumping to the bottom.
- It is pretty easy to build a dynamic web app using react because it takes few code lines and that too with high functionality.
- Since we spoke about Facebook, being its creator, they and their community built a special extension for Google Chrome, which can help in debugging process, and this makes it more promising, fast, and easy to go.
- Unidirectional: React uses this data flow technique, which enables developers to work on, debugs easily. Therefore, data flows from parent to child, not vice versa.
- React enables UI to separate all of its components, which helps developers to work on debugs.
3. Apache Spark
An open-source platform has been highly praised in the entire world. When the world is about data and its importance, the spark has been working like a magic wand and that’s the reason tech giants like Netflix, eBay, etc. have deployed spark within their systems. Apache is generally being used to handle large-size data and to optimize query execution and it is being used as the developer API for Java, Python, etc. Spark was first introduced in 2009 and went public in 2010 (under a BSD license). Today big tech giants, fin-techs, core gaming, government bodies, and even companies like Apple, and Facebook are using spark in their streamlining. Besides this, spark offers easy-to-go APIs on large sets of data that also includes the collection of almost 100 operators for transforming data (into semi-structured one). Now, let’s look at some of the key components of Apache Spark.
- Apache Spark is one of the fastest especially when data is stored on disk, and surprisingly, it currently holds the world record for large-scale on-disk sorting which is 100TB of data using 206 EC2 i2. (8 x large machines) in 23 minutes.
- You can almost run multiple workloads with the help of spark, including interactive queries, (real-time) analytics, machine learning, and graph processing, and that too in a seamless flow.
- The most interesting part about spark is that it’s an ideal workload in the cloud because the cloud offers performance, scalability, reliability, availability, and massive economies of scale and for that spark is the primary choice in the industry.
4. Struts
It’s another perfect framework for developing Java web apps that were first introduced in 2000 by Craig McClanahan and later donated to the Apache Foundation. Being open-source platform struts offers MVC (Model-View-Controller) architectural pattern by offering pre-defined classes. Struts offer a wide range of predefined functionality that helps in making it easy to develop and maintain web-based Java applications. As of now, there are two versions of struts that are available 1.x (1.0,1.1,1.2) and 2.x (2.0,2.1,2.2), of which most of the companies do use the second version of this framework for their projects. Besides this, struts are used to extend Java servlet API that helps developers to work seamlessly with MVC patterns. Today, companies like Accenture, and Infosys are actively using this framework within their ecosystem to build big-scale projects. However, there are certain other features too that you should see as a front-end developer for working with this.
- Being a developer you can easily build and perform tasks by simply integrating struts in java and other frameworks (including those that aren’t built on the platform).
- The development time of the overall cycle is less as compared to others
- Struts also help in managing the application without any fuss.
5. Hibernate
An extremely lightweight, high-performance object-relational mapping (ORM) tool that is being used in the java programming language. Gavin King first introduced it in 2001 within Cirrus Technologies with a few of his colleagues. It was introduced as a replacement for EJB2-style entity beans so that it can perform better with little or no complexity. Coming to the point, being a developer, when you’ll be working with java, you’ll struggle with certain issues like Paradigm mismatch and that’s where Hibernate ORM comes in, this framework enables developers to work seamlessly and extract issues like Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch. If you’ll see the bigger picture, today companies like IBM, Oracle, and many others have adopted this framework and have been using it significantly. Now, let’s jump down to some of its basic features that you must know.
- Hibernate is highly productive, portable, and can be maintained easily
- It also allows you to communicate with the application’s database (any)
- It’s highly scalable and backs up with HQL (Hibernate Query Language)
6. Angular
It’s a framework used to build applications and the interesting part is it doesn’t load on its own (we’re talking about web-based apps and loading in a browser), and for that, we use java which acts as a webserver and loads all the credentials and let the app run. Usually, java developers run “Java” and “Angular” on two different parallel ports (this makes the process go fast too). Later the interaction between these two will be called by an API and by doing this you can easily port the angular into the java programming language. On the other hand, Angular 2+ offers declarative templates (let you cleanly separate your application’s logic from its presentation & based on HTML), dependency injection, the E2E tooling, etc. However, being a front-end developer, you must consider looking at these key features of angular before jumping to a conclusion.
- Since it is being handled by Google, it offers an excellent unit testing framework that is known as Karma
- While working with angular, requires comparatively less amount of coding than others
- It does not require any special code for data binding to the HTML controls
7. Apache Hadoop
You might be aware of the fact that we all are moving into a whole new digital era where all that matters is “Data” and it’s the only kingmaker now. Since its emergence, big data has reached its peak and is expected to stretch more folds in upcoming years. Just to solve the complexity of data (in big volumes), a framework was introduced in April 2006 by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella. The objective was to provide an open-source platform (written in Java) that allows distributed processing (for a big volume of data) across clusters of computers using simple programming models. The creators of Hadoop designed this framework in such a pattern that it can easily elevate from a single server to hundreds and thousands of machines (offering local computation & storage). If you’ll dig deeper, Hadoop has two major categorizations.
- MapReduce
- HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System)
Besides this, Hadoop has several benefits that you might consider before going for it.
- Hadoop is platform-independent which means you can run this on any platform.
- It is designed in such a way that it can automatically detect and handle any error (or failure) at the application layer
- Hadoop offers low network traffic, which enables it to split a task/job into different subcategories, and those jobs/tasks are then assigned to different data nodes.
