Apache Jakarta Commons: Reusable Java™ Components

Chapter 10. Lang

Almost every development project winds up with a lot of strange little utility functions, often buried in a class named something like “Utils.” Common examples include a utility function for escaping a bit of HTML or SQL, or a quick class to make it easier to return a Date object formatted to a particular locale. The Lang package is essentially a fifty-odd set of these utilities.

The difficult thing about the Lang package is not any particular complexity, but rather simply remembering what functionality is present. In this chapter, we provide a general overview of the Lang package. It may seem easy to write your own utility methods, but those thirty minute one-offs can start to add up—and other developers familiar with the Lang ...