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.
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
AdoptOpenJDK builds of OpenJDK
Oracle OpenJDK
Oracle JDK
Azul Zulu builds of OpenJDK
Amazon Corretto builds of OpenJDK
The Linux Distro’s bundled OpenJDK package
Red Hat builds of openJDK
Oracle GraalVM Community Edition
IBM Java SDK
Azul Zing
Alibaba Dragonwell builds of OpenJDK
Bellsoft Liberica builds of OpenJDK
Eclipse Adoptium builds of OpenJDK
Oracle GraalVM Enterprise Edition
SAP SapMachine builds of OpenJDK
HP-UX Java
Other
None
AdoptOpenJDK builds of OpenJDK
Oracle OpenJDK
Oracle JDK
Azul Zulu builds of OpenJDK
Amazon Corretto builds of OpenJDK
The Linux Distro’s bundled OpenJDK package
Red Hat builds of openJDK
Oracle GraalVM Community Edition
IBM Java SDK
Azul Zing
Alibaba Dragonwell builds of OpenJDK
Bellsoft Liberica builds of OpenJDK
Eclipse Adoptium builds of OpenJDK
Oracle GraalVM Enterprise Edition
SAP SapMachine builds of OpenJDK
HP-UX Java
Other
None
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.
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
6 or below
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
6 or below
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
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.
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Java
Kotlin
Groovy
Scala
Clojure
JRuby
Other
Java
Kotlin
Groovy
Scala
Clojure
JRuby
Other
This comprehensive Java 2021 report reflects the state of the JVM ecosystem. Our full JVM Ecosystem 2021 report has more details on what developers are using, the difference between development and production, and how developers adopt newer versions of Java.
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.
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
IntelliJ IDEA
Eclipse IDE
Visual Studio Code
Vi/Vim/Emacs/ect
Apache NetBeans
Android Studio
Oracle JDeveloper
Other
IntelliJ IDEA
Eclipse IDE
Visual Studio Code
Vi/Vim/Emacs/ect
Apache NetBeans
Android Studio
Oracle JDeveloper
Other
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.
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
Maven
Gradle
Ant
SBT
Other
None
Maven
Gradle
Ant
SBT
Other
None
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.
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
Spring Boot
Spring MVC
Java EE
Jakarta EE
Quarkus
JSF
Micro Profile
Micronaut
GWT
Dropwizard
Struts
Vaadin
JHipster
Play
Grails
Wicket
Other
None
Spring Boot
Spring MVC
Java EE
Jakarta EE
Quarkus
JSF
Micro Profile
Micronaut
GWT
Dropwizard
Struts
Vaadin
JHipster
Play
Grails
Wicket
Other
None
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.
This comprehensive Java 2021 report reflects the state of the JVM ecosystem. Our full JVM Ecosystem 2021 report has more details on what developers are using, the difference between development and production, and how developers adopt newer versions of Java.
Snyk is a developer security platform. Integrating directly into development tools, workflows, and automation pipelines, Snyk makes it easy for teams to find, prioritize, and fix security vulnerabilities in code, dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code. Supported by industry-leading application and security intelligence, Snyk puts security expertise in any developer’s toolkit.
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