Java Community Chooses Best Libraries of 2024

Java Community Chooses the Best Libraries of the Year: 2024 Voting Results

Every year, Java developers eagerly await the results of the vote for the best libraries and tools in the ecosystem. This year, the community once again determined the favorites in key categories — from testing and web development to utilities and DevOps tools. We have gathered the main winners so you can update your technology stack.

Category "Testing": JUnit 5 Remains King

The permanent leader in this category is JUnit 5. Despite the emergence of new testing frameworks (for example, Testcontainers and Selenide), JUnit 5 continues to hold its position thanks to its flexibility, support for parameterized tests, and deep integration with modern IDEs. Second place went to Mockito — an indispensable tool for creating mock objects in unit tests.

Category "Web Frameworks": Spring Boot is Unrivaled

Here, Spring Boot won by a large margin. The community noted its ability to quickly deploy production-grade applications with minimal configuration. Second place was taken by Quarkus — a framework optimized for cloud-native and serverless architectures. Third place went to Micronaut, which is valued for its fast startup and low memory consumption.

Category "Utilities and General Purpose Libraries"

• Lombok — winner of the year. The library, which automatically generates getters, setters, constructors, and builders, remains a favorite among Java developers. It significantly reduces boilerplate code.
• Guava from Google — a stable second place. The set of extended collections, caching, and string utilities continues to be the de facto standard.
• Apache Commons — a time-tested library that took third place. The Commons IO, Commons Lang, and Commons Collections modules are especially useful.

Category "DevOps and Build": Gradle Overtakes Maven

This year, Gradle overtook Maven for the first time. Developers note its incremental compilation, Kotlin DSL support, and better performance in CI/CD. Maven took second place, and Docker Compose for Java — a tool for locally deploying test infrastructure — rounds out the top three.

Why is this important for a Java developer?

The community vote is not just a popularity ranking. It is an indicator of which tools truly solve developer problems: simplify code, speed up builds, and make applications more reliable. If you are not yet using this year's winners, now is a great time to try them in your projects.

The full list of nominees and voting statistics can be found on the official Java Community Poll portal. Follow updates on PythonLib — we will continue to talk about the best tools for developers.