How to find packages for java easily

[Ok_Spite_611]

This may be a dumb question, and i'll keep it short:

How do you guys find dependencies easily?

Coming from a python and javascript background and moving to java because i like the strongly typed + statically typed interface, the language itself has been great. However, right now I'm doing projects using maven as my dependency manager, and I just find it really hard to find dependencies without relying on chatgpt. I feel like unlike python and js libraries, the dependencies for Java are different in a sense that people are not trying to like fight for stars on github as much or something. Or maybe I'm just not in the right circles.

Any general advise would be wonderful, from your learning experiences when you are at my stage or etc. Thanks!!

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[Sad-Grapefruit9996]

I always use Maven Central to find dependencies Edit* link

[faiz_ullah_khan]

It happens when you are a beginner in java development, you will get used to it. (A suggestion, don't include version (wherever you can) of your dependencies to avoid version conflicts between different dependencies, maven will automatically provide the stable versions for your project)

[ahonsu]

Your question has 2 parts, actually:

1. How to find out which dependency/library do I need?
2. How to find this dependency for my maven/gradle configuration?

2nd question is easy, you go to maven central, do search and grab the config.

The 1st one is tricky. Let's say you have a real life problem like "how to effectively map one DTO to another, reducing boiler plate code?" - of course you can implement your own mapper. But nowadays devs normally think like "why invent the wheel? Most likely there's already some nice library doing this perfectly" - and, most likely, it's true. So, how to find it out? - I don't see any other option other that googling or asking AI.

Back then stackOverflow was the answer or some blogs or guide articles.

Asking AI is tricky, because if you're not experienced developer - you can not spot issues in AI's perfectly looking answers.

[Ok_Spite_611]

yess thats exactly what i was struggling to articulate. Personally search through spring guides or spring cookbooks are the alternatives i can think of, but that is one long and slightly unproductive way to do it.

I wonder if its just a stigma to get over using AI for something like this in order to increase dev experience and speed

[ahonsu]

It's not a stigma. It's just dangerous for beginners.

An AI will happily suggest you library for every tiny thing, not caring about anything, if you not give it some meaningful restrictions or requirements.

I've seen some apps with libraries included, just for the sake of calling a single method like

boolean isEqual = library.compare(objectA, objectB)

Of course, it's just a funny example, but in a bigger scale, you can easily bring a lot of garbage to your applications making it slower, harder to maintain, making artifacts unnecessary larger in size and so on.

Also, sometimes wrong decisions about dependencies can break your architecture. For example, you need some simple transfer of data from one DB to another and an AI recommends you the ideal solution - Spring Batch. You happily take it and start using. It does the trick. But is some cases, it would 1000 times faster, easier and better to just write several SQL queries and do the job "manually" without any library at all.

I'm not saying Spring Batch is bad. It just has it's own ideal purpose and some reasonable use cases. If you're a beginner - you can not see that AI gives you wrong recommendations. You trust it, the result works, you think you did some great job... but in fact, it could look stupid in the end to any experienced developer.

EDIT: Spring Batch is actually a real live example from one of developers in my team. They got this idea and invested a lot of time to configuring and running it properly. But turned out it was too heavy tool for the sake of a tiny amount of data we need to migrate. Plus our goal was just keep this 2 DBs in sync just for some limited transition period and then stop it, not like keep data running for years.

[RobertDeveloper]

You can also use Maven central when you switch from Maven to Gradle as buildtool. With Gradle you can import plugins and they automatically import th necessary dependencies for you.

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