JPARSEC: a Java package for astronomy with twelve years of development and use

Abstract

JPARSEC is a Java library initially developed to implement a complete set of algorithms to compute ephemerides. The project started twelve years ago and soon evolved to also cover astrophysical modelling and outreach. JPARSEC itself includes more than 250 000 lines of code, similar or larger than other popular tools like Astropy, complemented with models and other projects operational since years. The library is focused on being robust, optimized, well written and documented, providing a complete set of tools for astronomers, with special attention to radioastronomy. The projects written using JPARSEC as the core library cover a wide range of fields from models with complete graphical user interfaces to an ephemerides server with high quality charts, or even an Android planetarium. In this Paper I present the main characteristics of JPARSEC, with special attention to the core library and documentation, and I describe the main projects developed based on it.