...has just been released: https://snyk.io/jvm-ecosystem-report-2021 and gives quite interesting overview of the Java world we're living in. Full version (33 pages!) is free and available for download under this link .
Key takeaways
- AdoptOpenJDK dominates - 44% of developers uses this distro. Interesting point - Amazon Corretto gets only 9% share. Sounds as if the community learnt not to trust corporations ;-)
- Systems move away from Java 8 (more use 11 in production already). Also, more than 25% of the Java developers use Java 15 in development. That's a good thing showing that ecosystem is healthy and alive.
- Kotlin is the second most important language on the JVM (more popular than Groovy or Scala). There are also 531k repos in Kotlin on Github as compared to 194k in Scala / 64k in Groovy. One possible explanation is that Kotlin simply fixes what's broken in Java without overcomplicating things (yes Scala I'm looking at you).
Most surprising (or are they?)
- Maven is still the most popular build system for Java with 76% of developers using it. There is more - Maven scored better numbers than a year ago! Given high popularity of Gradle here-and-there (for example in OSS projects) and general tendency to scrap XML-based tools, this is quite interesting piece of data.
- Domination of Spring, with more than 50% of developers using Spring Boot and almost 30% using Spring MVC. This sounds surprising as I've recently heard a lot (and I mean it - a lot) of complains about how bloated and complex Spring has become. With so many configuration modules being loaded automatically by default it's sometimes crazy hard to understand what the hell is happening when the app starts. On the other hand Spring Boot allows for startup of a new project in a mere second (or few more). Does that mean that in general developers prefer (or are required to prefer) speed of development versus quality/speed/control?
Happy reading! Let me know if you find something surprising / interesting in the report.
