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Eclipse Enterprise Survey Shows What Java Devs Want in 2019

• By John K. Waters
• May 22, 2019

What do enterprise Java developers want the Eclipse Foundation to prioritize as the new shepherd of Jakarta EE? According to the results of the foundation's newly published 2019 Jakarta EE developer survey they want better support for microservices, native integration with the Kubernetes container orchestration platform, and a production-quality reference implementation.

The first two actually tied for first among respondents at 61 percent each, with the third accounting for 37 percent.

The survey was conducted online by the foundation in March in cooperation with member companies and partners, including the London Java Community and Java User Groups worldwide. The number of individual respondents totaled 1,772, who answered questions about their adoption of Jakarta EE and trends in Java programming. The goal of the survey was to help Java ecosystem stakeholders better understand the requirements, priorities, and perceptions of enterprise Java developer communities.

Among the key findings of the survey: "The future of the Java ecosystem and Jakarta EE is increasingly driven by new cloud workloads and capabilities."

"Java continues to dominate as the language of choice for organizations deploying applications in production environments," said Mike Milinkovich, the foundation's executive director, "and this latest survey shows the same level of support as our 2018 survey. What's most interesting is to see the acceleration in the adoption of Java in new cloud native architectures. Clearly the future of Jakarta EE is cloud native."

Milinkovich came to that conclusion based on several responses to the survey, including:

• Cloud native is critically important with a third of developers currently building cloud native architectures, and another 30 percent planning to within the next year
• The number of Java applications running in the cloud is projected to increase significantly over the next two years, with 32 percent of respondents expecting that they will be running nearly two-thirds of their Java applications in the cloud in two years' time
• The microservices architecture is the dominant approach to implementing Java in the cloud, according to 43 percent of respondents
• Spring and Spring Boot continue to dominate as the leading frameworks for building cloud native applications in Java
• Eclipse Microprofile experienced a surge in usage, more than doubling in adoption from 13 percent in 2018 to 28 percent today

Other survey findings worth noting:

• Java EE 8 adoption has picked up and stands at 37 percent compared to 21 percentin the 2018 survey
• Java 11 use has surged to 20 percent, with many enterprises apparently leap frogging Java 9 and 10. Java 8 usage has held steady at 84 percent
• More than a fifth of respondents report that they are running more than 60 percent of Java applications in the cloud
• Respondents were more likely (40 percent) to modify existing Java applications for migration to the cloud while 29 percent were writing greenfield new cloud native Java applications

The complete report is available online.