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.
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.
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 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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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