Considerations on using thirty party libraries to build your application.

Have you ever thought twice when you use a third party java library to implement your system? Well you should. Some of the reasons are

1. Is the community active.(fix bugs pitfalls, and other aspects)
2. Licensing
3. Using many number of libraries many cause increase in dependencies on third parties.
4. Some bugs in your system may be because of a third party library.
5. Updating resources in the system(OS, jre, etc...) may cause the system to break and then we will have to replace the library with the updated one if exists, replace the library with another third-party software, folk the software and fix it, or re-implement the functionality by our own.

Having said that we still do need third party libraries in almost all implementations. But keeping these dependencies to a minimum is very important because of the above said reasons.

Http client library for java

I've been searching for a java http client for one of my projects. then I came across a simple library called jakartha commons client. As it turns out, this library is at it's end of life. So I was wondering a good library implementation of http client. After many tryouts, it seems apache http components is the go to library for general needs of http client.

http://hc.apache.org/

However if you are a spring user, then spring also provides facilities for http client requests.
http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/3.0.x/api/org/springframework/http/client/package-summary.html

Having said that, the scope of this implementation is very limited. So my personal preference is apache http components over spring implementation, unless the requirement is very basic.