Third Party Libraries in Java Programming

In developing our system (which made me stressful these past months), we have to have something that would help us finish the development earlier than average development time. So we decided using Netbeans, a software that could help us. In website development, it is like a Dreamweaver where as JCreator or Eclipse is a notepad. However, there are modules in the system like generating of graphs, importing of excel files and customation of GUI that needs to be done quickly. Instead of hardcoding those things, we used third party libraries for them.

To make these things clear, I'll give an example. Our other friend from the other group generated graph for their CHITS system. It took him more or less a month to code it. While I programmed a module that generates report, it took me more or less 3 hours to study the codes, copy paste the examples, modify it and customize. This is how helpful the 3rd party libraries are. And what's even great is that these libraries are free! The three libraries that we chose are:


JFree Chart - generates graphs, charts, etc for reporting
JExcel - supported by javasun (the developers of java), I think it's third party because I still have to download the library before i get to use it.
Look and Feel in UIManager - I'll be researching more about this and post it here because it's my groupmate that implemented it. Basically it modifies the GUI.

I'll be posting the sites were you can freely download these libraries sooner.

(Back to work for now)

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