Is there a defacto 3rd party utilities library for Salesforce Apex such as Apache Commons is for Java?

Hi Manpreet,

Apex-lang is about as close to a Java-style library as you can get. Contains several string, database, and collection utilities that mimmick Java functionality. Be aware though, some stuff including Comparing and Sorting collections is out of date with the advent of the Comparable interface in Apex.

In addition to apex-lang, and like you suggest, I typically create or reuse static helper methods throughout my projects. Static helper methods are very convenient for reusing code in Chatter functionality, DML handling, Exception handling, Unit testing, etc.