Hi all - not sure if this is the most appropriate ...

# getting-started

[CanOfBees]

Hi all - not sure if this is the most appropriate place for this kind of question, but here goes: I'm trying to get my toes damp with Kotlin by working on a command line utility to do image conversions (specifically TIFF to JP2K (JPEG2000)). My general question is: how the heck do you pick libraries for this? I don't have any indepth familiarity with the Java library ecosystem (I know that it's vast). How do you all make determinations about these sorts of things?

Many thanks in advance - I appreciate your time and trouble!

[Shawn]

this specific question might be more tailored to #random, but I think some generally decent advice would be to do some cursory exploration to see how well maintained and widely-used a given library is. If it doesn’t look like the project has been abandoned, then I’d personally have a look over the API and kinda get a feel for how the authors intended it to be used and try to figure out whether or not it’d be a good fit for my project. After that I guess it’s a matter of business needs - if you’re making a decision for something a lot of people are going to use, then you might google basic stuff like “$library performance” or “$library problems” to try and get a feel for what the pain points are, and if said pain points are relevant to you. StackOverflow can be rather telling at times in this regard. For most big/common problems, there’s usually a small handful of popular libraries that have a fair amount of support and are well-maintained, so a lot of the legwork has been done for you. For more niche things you might spend a bit more time researching or just testing it out on your own

[CanOfBees]

@Shawn hey, thanks for the thoughtful reply!