Google Guava vs. Apache Commons

java collections apache-commons guava
Joonas Pulakka picture Joonas Pulakka · Sep 18, 2009 · Viewed 65.6k times · Source

I was looking for a bidirectional map implementation in Java, and stumbled upon these two libraries:

Both are free, have the bidirectional map implementation that I was looking for (BidiMap in Apache, BiMap in Google), are amazingly nearly the same size (Apache 493 kB, Google 499 kB) [ed.: no longer true!] and seem in all ways pretty similar to me.

Which one should I choose, and why? Are there some other equivalent alternatives (must be free and have at least the bidirectional map)? I'm working with the latest Java SE, so no need to artificially limit to Java 5 or anything like that.

Answer

Joachim Sauer picture Joachim Sauer · Sep 18, 2009

In my opinion the better choice is Guava (formerly known as Google collections):

  • it's more modern (has generics)
  • it absolutely follows the Collections API requirements
  • it's actively maintained
  • CacheBuilder and it's predecessor MapMaker are just plain awesome

Apache Commons Collections is a good library as well, but it has long failed to provide a generics-enabled version (which is a major drawback for a collections API in my opinion) and generally seems to be in a maintenance/don't-do-too-much-work-on-it mode Recently Commons Collections has picked up some steam again, but it has some catching up to do..

If download size/memory footprint/code size is an issue then Apache Commons Collections might be a better candidate, since it is a common dependency of other libraries. Therefore using it in your own code as well could potentially be done without adding any additional dependencies. Edit: This particular "advantage" has been partially subverted by now, since many new libraries actually depend on Guava and not on Apache Commons Collections.

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