Lang

Commons Lang

Lang aims to provide:

• Comprehensive String handling utilities

• Enumerated types (pre JDK 1.5)

• Nested exceptions (pre JDK 1.4)

• Builders to create hashCode, equals, toString and compareTo methods

• Utilities for Object, Date and Numbers

The Javadoc of the latest version (2.1) is available.

The Javadoc of the CVS version (development) is available.

Development plan for 2.2

1. Bug fixes

2. StrTokenizer

3. StrBuilder

4. VariableFormatter/interpolator - 18962

Other ideas

1. 21663 [lang] Add support in ToStringStyle for DateFormat. - Grows quickly into commons-convert

2. 27643 [lang][patch] ClassUtils.newInstance method - Seems unnecessary

3. 29149 [lang] StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml() doesn't handle an empty entity - Empty entity is in fact illegal HTML, so need to decide if we should ignore. Current behaviour seems acceptable as we're not in the work with bad HTML market.

4. 26659 [lang] add method to DateUtils to get the distance between 2 dates - Mainly replicated by DurationFormatUtils, or non-obvious

5. 29692 [lang] String indentation feature request - Needs design as a non-simple problem

6. 22172 [lang] DateUtils.parseCVS behavior parsing "h:mm z" - Moved to sandbox

7. 26297 [lang] BitSetUtils class, toIndexArray and fromIndexArray

8. 21333 Add TimeoutController - Class in HttpClient. Leaving til 3.0 as not much movement on it

9. 30674 Support HttpClient's DateParser class - This is basically a Date parseDate(String dateValue, String[] dateFormats) method.

10. LocaleUtils - including toLocale(String,String)

11. CloneUtils - multiple ways to clone an object

Articles

This article http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/29392/0/page/6 discusses some of the interesting classes in Commons Lang with real world examples.