What is the current state of the Java Ecosystem, and what are developers using.
It is interesting to see that 44.1% of respondents use the free AdoptOpenJDK distribution in production, making it the most prevalent in our survey. However, we can also see that Oracle is still a big player in the market, with 28% for their OpenJDK build and 23% for the commercial Oracle JDK.
Over 60% of developers use Java SE 11 in production.
We found out that 40% of the survey participants use more than one Java version in production. Because of this, we can also conclude that more people than we realized do upgrade to versions beyond 8. Currently, 61.5% are using Java 11 in production, and almost 12% are using the latest release, which was Java 15 during the survey. This shows that developers do upgrade their Java version beyond Java 8
Java most popular with 91%, Kotlin second with almost 18%
While the variety of JVM languages grew over the last couple of years, Java is very much on top. With over 90% of developers using Java, we can see that it remains a very popular language. The popularity of Kotlin is more extensive than we thought last year. With an impressive 17.7% of the developers using Kotlin in production.
Over 70% of JVM developers use IntelliJ IDEA
For years, we’ve seen the dominance of JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA in the Java ecosystem. This year is not any different. IntelliJ IDEA is the most widely used within the JVM community. Also, the adoption of Visual Studio Code and Apache Netbeans grew tremendously.
We found out that more than half of the JVM community sees fit for multiple IDEs.
More than 76% of the JVM developers use Maven to build their applications
Maven is still the number one build system for the Java ecosystem. With more than 76% of developers using Maven, it is even higher than in last year’s survey. Gradle is comfortably holding second place with 38.1%, also scoring higher than it did last year.
The Java world is still a Spring-dominated world, with over half of the market using Spring Boot and almost a third using Spring MVC. In general, we see that we live in a highly Spring-dominated universe, which appears to indicate that the Spring folks are doing a great job serving the community.
A word about our survey
This report presents the results of the largest annual survey on the state of the JVM ecosystem. The survey was conducted over a period of six weeks through February and March 2021, gathering the responses of over 2000 Java developers.
This year’s survey is a cooperation between Snyk and Azul and was slightly different from the previous surveys. We aimed for the survey to be more concise and focus only on the most important aspects of JVM developers today. Additionally, this year every participant was allowed to choose multiple options. We believe that the way the 2021 survey was designed, we have a better and more comprehensive view of the current JVM ecosystem. You can find all demographic information in the report.