Gone Shopping
With all the open source projects out there, it can be difficult to evaluate all the libraries for any given task, especially for smaller areas where there is no established patterns. This process feels a lot like shopping: first, make a list of available products, and then evaluate each one. The evaluation process can be excruciating depending on your personality. So I’ve been trying to take the advice of my 7-year old who tells me, “why do you always do you always think about things so much, just choose”. The last time I had to shop for a library was in evaluating Java JSON libraries last week. Each of the 17 libraries on the JSON.org site seemed just as good as the other. So I quickly flipped through each one and two stood out to me: JSON Simple and Jackson. If you look at the two links, I think you’ll get an idea of what appeals to me: simplicity and an academic approach. In the end, I chose Jackson because the guy who wrote it (Tatu Saloranta) seems like one of those clever C guys with the emphasis on efficiency and the old school interface. In an uncertain environment, I’ll take one of these guys over the new-fangled interface with 5 external jar dependencies any day.
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