/ DEPENDENCY, GUAVA

Guava is an heavyweight library and I would like this to change

Google Guava is an useful library that offers many different but unrelated features:

However, this article is not about those features but about offering a single heavyweight Uber JAR for all. From Google’s point-of-view, providing an Uber library for all projects makes sense: "Hey guys, just add this dependency and it will meet your every requirement". However, from my point of view, this is just making my applications heavier.

Cohesion is at the root of good software development. Many framework providers, such as Spring and JBoss, release nicely cohesive packages and manage dependencies between them through a Dependency Management tool. What is strange is that most Guava’s features are not coupled together, so a having single library is not mandatory. Even stranger, Guava has previously been released in different JARs but Google stopped doing that with version r03.

I have found no solution beside creating separate JARs and handling dependencies myself, then storing them in a Maven Enterprise Repository. Since these tasks are required for each release, I never found the ROI interesting enough. The easiest way would be for Google to do that at build time.

Dear Google engineers, if by chance you happen to stumble upon this article, I’d be very grateful if you’d consider it.

Nicolas Fränkel

Nicolas Fränkel

Developer Advocate with 15+ years experience consulting for many different customers, in a wide range of contexts (such as telecoms, banking, insurances, large retail and public sector). Usually working on Java/Java EE and Spring technologies, but with focused interests like Rich Internet Applications, Testing, CI/CD and DevOps. Also double as a trainer and triples as a book author.

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Guava is an heavyweight library and I would like this to change
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