Create QR Codes in Java

Nowadays, Quick Response (QR) Codes are becoming more and more useful as they have gone mainstream, thanks to the smart phones. Right from the bus shelter, product packaging, home improvement store, automobile, a lot of internet websites are integrating QR Codes on their pages to let people quickly reach them. With increase in number of users of smart phones day by day, the QR codes usage is going up exponentially.

Introduction to QR Codes

A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) first designed for the automotive industry. More recently, the system has become popular outside of the industry due to its fast readability and comparatively large storage capacity. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be made up of four standardized kinds (“modes”) of data (numeric, alphanumeric, byte/binary, Kanji), or by supported extensions virtually any kind of data.

Created by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave in 1994 to track vehicles during the manufacturing process, the QR code is one of the most popular types of two-dimensional barcodes. It was designed to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

QR Code in Java

zxing-core-1.7.jar (346 KB)

zxing-javase-1.7.jar (21 KB)

Zebra Crossing (ZXing) is an awesome open source library that one can use to generate / parse QR Codes in almost all the platforms (Android, JavaSE, IPhone, RIM, Symbian etc). But if you have to generate simple QR Codes, I found it a bit clumsy to implement.

However QRGen is a good library that creates a layer on top of ZXing and makes QR Code generation in Java a piece of cake. It has a dependency on ZXing, so you would need ZXing jar files along with QRGen to create QR Codes in Java.

On the download page of ZXing, you will not find the JAR files. Instead we have to create JAR files using the source code. I have already generated these JAR files. Here are the links:

Include these JAR files in your Classpath and execute following Java code to generate QR Code.

package in.notes.qrcode;



import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;

import java.io.File;

import java.io.FileNotFoundException;

import java.io.FileOutputStream;

import java.io.IOException;



import net.glxn.qrgen.QRCode;

import net.glxn.qrgen.image.ImageType;


public class Main {

 public static void main(String[] args) {

  ByteArrayOutputStream out = QRCode.from("Hello World")

          .to(ImageType.PNG).stream();

  try {

   FileOutputStream fout = new FileOutputStream(new File(

     "C:\\QR_Code.JPG"));

   fout.write(out.toByteArray());

   fout.flush();

   fout.close();

  } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {

   // Do Logging

  } catch (IOException e) {

   // Do Logging

  }

 }

}

We used QRCode class to generate QR Code Stream and write the byte stream to a file C:\QR_Code.JPG.