I was doing a bit of data analysis of the data that drives our Nexus Professional popularity results and I came across some statistics that show demand for Google Guava has been picking up over the last year. Our Top 10 list for general utilities contains the usual suspects. Libraries like Commons Lang and Commons Beanutils are predictably near the top of the list as are both log4j and slf4j. Not only are these the utilities you'd expect to see in almost every Java project, many of the dependencies you depend on also reference these libraries. This list is a list of utilities and projects you'd better be familiar with if you are programming in Java because you will undoubtedly encounter them.
Here is a list of the Top 10 Utilities from April 2012. Note how Google Guava jumped three places from #15 to #12 with a 2.5% increase in demand from March. While I don't expect Google Guava to surpass the popularity of Apache Commons components any time soon, it will be interesting to see if Guava becomes a standard that challenges Commons Lang. Guava, like Apache Commons, is a collection of utilities and classes that supplement Java, while they have overlapping purposes, I tend to continue to have both on my classpath whenever I'm coding.
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Caveat: I'm comparing utility libraries with the exception of JUnit. JUnit is downloaded automatically by a number of tools (tools that don't appear to cache artifacts between instantiation). Because of this JUnit downloads are off the chart. If you average out the data, JUnit is being downloaded approximately once a second (across the entire month).