Using Existing Libraries Versus Writing Your Own

[Adrian Crum]

I hate reinventing the wheel. It's a waste of time. I'd rather use 
someone else's wheel invention.

When programming, I'd rather do some research and find existing code 
that does what I want - instead of writing my own code. The less code I 
write, the less code I have to maintain.

OFBiz does a pretty good job of building on existing code libraries. But 
every once in a while, we end up writing code that already exists 
elsewhere. As an example, I recently removed a utility method that 
duplicated a method that already existed in the Apache Commons library.

So, I'm sending this out to the developer community as a reminder: 
Before you create a new method or class or framework, take some time to 
see if it already exists somewhere.

-Adrian