&gt; I understand if you are relying on a large portion of a library and you need to use it, but why bring an entire library in for one function.<p>Why not? An extra 3MB of disk space? A few milliseconds more of compile time? Maven makes it very easy to work with dependencies (and you want to use maven anyway, even if you have no dependencies, so that you have a proper release process). At this point I think of basic utility libraries like guava-collections, commons-io, httpclient and junit as part of the standard library. If I need even one function from one of them I&#x27;ll add the dependency. Better that than have two inconsistent ways of doing the same thing.