The MediaType class in Guava is a useful abstraction of MIME types, also known as “media type” or “content type”. It has a lot of predefined constants for the most common types, and it allows you to create new instances specifying either a precise type or a wildcard, using “*”. Furthermore, it has the concept of “charset”, which makes it very useful when using it in web applications. Finally, it has an overridden toString method which is compliant with the RFC 2045.