I’ve been running the yearly 2019 “State of Java” survey for the last couple of weeks.
In its 6th year, we had 6707 developers taking the time to go through and answer; if that was you – thank you!
Time for the results 🙂
1. Java Adoption
Even today, Java 8 is still
Not surprisingly, Java 8 is still predominantly used in production:
Clearly, Java 8 is here to stay – with a drop from last year at 84.7% to this year at 79.8%.
2. Framework Adoption
Next, let’s see what the framework story looks this year:
As opposed to Java, this is an entirely different story. Spring 4 was over 50% last year and it’s now hitting 30%, and Spring 5 went up from 24% to 58.4% today.
The Java EE / Jakarta EE numbers are also interesting – going from 9.5% last year to now 14%. The current more stable and well-understood path is clearly helping.
3. Spring Boot Adoption
On to Spring Boot – again, the adoption and the speed with which the community is moving to the latest version is impressive and speaks volumes about the maturity of the ecosystem.
Boot 2 went up from around the 30% mark last year all the way to 60.5% now:
And, the 1.4 or older is starting to drop off the chart here, which is also cool.
The build tools story is probably the most stable of all of the data here. Maven is exactly where it was last year – dominating the landscape:
5. IDE Adoption
IDEs, on the other hand, are a different story. IntelliJ is clearly winning the race here, with 61.3% (up from 55.4% last year):
Eclipse is about half of that – with 32.8% this year, down from 38% last year. Not a surprising pattern here.
6. Web/Application Server Adoption
This is the second year where I decided to ask this question – so it’s great to finally have these numbers but also the data from last year to compare to.
Tomcat is clearly still the winner here, with a cool 73% of the market (up from 62.5% – which is crazy growth).
7. Other JVM Languages
On to other languages on the JVM.
First, what’s somewhat surprising and interesting here is that 62.6% of developers are only using Java, exactly like last year (62.8%). I was definitely expecting this number to go down, given the strong adoption of Kotlin, but it looks like it hasn’t, yet:
That being said, Kotlin did still grow from 13% last year to 16.5% today.
Groovy fell from 19.3% to 17.4% today, most of that attention likely now going to Kotlin.
Scala also fell about 1.1%, now to 8.6%.
So, the trend is clear – Kotlin is chipping away at the other JVM languages, and quite successfully.
8. DBs
And, finally – DBs – with MySQL stable and PostgreSQL growing a full 5% since last year:
9. Conclusion
There we have it – a very interesting look at the Java ecosystem now, in 2019.
Some really unexpected bits of data, and definitely some not-so-unexpected ones.
All in all, a very cool look at the Java community, and again – big thanks to everyone who voted.
