JRebel has published the 2022 Java Developer Productivity Report, and this year marks the 10th anniversary of this annual publication about Java trends. Many things have changed in the past 10 years as most of today’s common technologies were not yet invented, for example: Docker, Kubernetes and microservices. Over 876 Java development professionals responded to the survey that ran from October 2021 to January 2022.
The top three countries represented in the survey by location of the respondents’ company headquarters are located in the United States, China and Germany at 177, 128 and 60, respectively. Developer and Java Architect are the most common roles with 48% and 22%, respectively, while the most common team size is 3-9 developers (47%) followed by 10-20 developers (22%). Large enterprises (1000+ people) and mid-size enterprises (100-1000 people) are the most described at 31% and 27%.
The first questions of the survey are related to the JDK language in use, the plan to migrate to JDK 17 and the preferred JDK distribution.
The image below shows the results for the most used JDK languages:
Java 8 continues to be strong but Java 11 is catching up. Kotlin is confirmed to be the most used JVM language outside Java.
JDK 17 LTS, released in September 2021, is gaining momentum. Among the respondents, 37% reported planning to upgrade within the next six months, and others 25% planning to upgrade within the next 6-12 months. This is an aggregate result of 62%.
When asked which JRE/JDK distribution is in use in their application, respondents replied as shown in the image below:
It is no surprise that Oracle Java stands out as the leader since large companies are well represented in the demography of the study.
The survey then tracked Architecture Trends with Microservices-based applications being the most widespread at 32%, followed by Monolith at 22% and then Modular Monolith at 13%. Unsurprisingly, Spring Boot is leading the competition (74%) as the favorite framework for microservices. One of the reasons that have driven the adoption of microservices applications was the reduction in the redeploy time compared to monolith applications, but according to this analysis, 18% of the respondents spend 6-10 minutes per container and 26% more than 10 minutes. Redeploy times could still be improved.
Docker (41%) and Kubernetes (26%) are the most popular selections of virtualization platform.
AWS (31%) beats Azure (14%) and Google Cloud Platform (8%) as the favored PaaS provider.
Jenkins once again dominates the CI/CD world at 46% but Github Actions is the new runner-up at 16%.
Tomcat and Maven are still the top choices among application servers and build tools categories, while in the IDE world Intellij IDEA is the top pick at 48%, but VS Code is gaining in popularity (18%).
Founded in 2007 by Jevgeni Kabanov and Toomas Römer as ZeroTurnaround, JRebel is active in the market of Java development productivity tools and has been owned by Perforce Software since 2019.