6 Tools for Java Developers

Learning these six tools can help you improve the quality of your code and become a more efficient Java developer.

Eclipse

This works like a Swiss army knife of IDEs, featuring a heavily customizable interface and countless plugins. This separates its workflow into three areas: the Workbench, the workspace, and the perspective.

Gradle

This is a project automation tool that builds on the features of Apache Maven and Apache Ant. While Gradle isn’t the most popular build tool available (that honor goes to Maven, which 64% of Java developers prefer).

Javadoc

This is a documentation generator provided by Oracle. It parses specially formatted comments into HTML documents. Javadoc automatically formats tags and keywords unless otherwise specified.

JUnit

This tool is an open source framework for writing and running unit tests. A basic JUnit test consists of a testing class, a testing method, and the functionality to be tested.

Cobertura

This analyzes Java code for test coverage and generates HTML-based reports based on the amount of code that isn’t covered by testing.

FindBugs

This compiled code against a database of bugs, and when provided with the source code, FindBugs also highlights the lines of code affected by detected bugs.