Every year, JRebel, a company that develops tools to improve the efficiency of Java programming, conducts a survey. Developers from the US, China, and Europe answer the questions about significant industry trends: popular JDK versions, application architecture, and build tools. In this text, we have collected the main results of the survey.
![Java Trends in 2022: Java 8, Apache Tomcat, and Microservices - 1]()
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Most companies have applications entirely based on microservices or are currently moving to a microservices architecture.
Interestingly, larger companies (100+ employees) show higher adoption of microservices at 36%, which contrasts sharply with smaller companies (under 100 employees) at 28%.
Among the frameworks that developers use to work with microservices, the Spring Boot framework is the leader with 74%.
Frameworks Quarkus, Vert.x and DropWizard round out the top four with 5%, 2%, and 1%, respectively.
Among the build tools, the Maven framework is the leader (68%). The second place belongs to Gradle (23% of developers), and Ant is in the third place (6%).
Currently, IntelliJ IDEA is the most popular IDE for developing Java applications, with 48% of respondents choosing it as their preferred development environment. Eclipse (24%), VSCode (18%), and Netbeans (6%) are following IntelliJ.
![Java Trends in 2022: Java 8, Apache Tomcat, and Microservices - 1](https://cdn.codegym.cc/images/article/6ae9c57b-f556-4e6a-997e-4c866a88743d/800.jpeg)
Which JDK version do developers choose?
Most developers say they use Java 8 (37% of those surveyed) as their programming language in their primary application. Java 11 occupies the second place (it’s popular among 29% of developers). Next, come Java 12 or newer (12% of developers) and Java 7 or older (5% of respondents). The programming languages Kotlin, Groovy, and Scala were the least popular among developers, but collectively 17% of the developers surveyed use them.![Java Trends in 2022: Java 8, Apache Tomcat, and Microservices - 2](https://cdn.codegym.cc/images/article/3c4ab692-0d9e-4399-b9df-aae8094d1554/512.jpeg)
Which JRE/JDK distributions do you prefer?
36% of respondents prefer Oracle Java. Generic OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK/Adoptium are also among the top three with 27% and 16%, respectively. 2.3% of developers choose distributions of OpenLogic OpenJDK.![Java Trends in 2022: Java 8, Apache Tomcat, and Microservices - 3](https://cdn.codegym.cc/images/article/ab4c5b57-a6eb-4cfd-9665-36f7acfcf4b2/512.jpeg)
Java Application Architecture Trends: Microservices and Monolithic Applications
The developers also have spoken about the architecture of the applications they have developed. Microservices-based applications are the most popular (32%), followed by monolithic applications (22%). Modular-monolithic applications account for 13% of responses, and service-oriented architectures — for 12%.![Java Trends in 2022: Java 8, Apache Tomcat, and Microservices - 4](https://cdn.codegym.cc/images/article/bbebc48c-9fc9-410e-a4f5-d1c35c987ab7/512.jpeg)
![Java Trends in 2022: Java 8, Apache Tomcat, and Microservices - 5](https://cdn.codegym.cc/images/article/dfd8a9bf-94ce-4f5b-9776-992006158c27/512.jpeg)
Java Developer Tools: Apache Tomcat and IntelliJ IDEA
According to the survey, Apache Tomcat is the most popular Java application server, with 48% of developers using it. Tomcat is followed by JBoss/Wildfly (15%), Jetty (13%), WebLogic (7%), WebSphere (5%) and GlassFish (4%) application servers.![Java Trends in 2022: Java 8, Apache Tomcat, and Microservices - 6](https://cdn.codegym.cc/images/article/747669cf-94df-4bd1-a209-11aa14b0bda6/512.jpeg)
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