Eclipse Foundation Releases 2020 Jakarta/Java Survey Findings

The Eclipse Foundation has been busy since the organization announced its move to Belgium last month. It announced the first milestone release of Jakarta EE 9, and published a white paper about open source in Europe and it just posted the results of its 2020 Jakarta EE Developer Survey. 

Based on the responses of several thousand enterprise developer, the survey provides a fascinating look at the growth of open source enterprise Java, as well as some details on what developer interest in things like microservices and platforms.

"Since the release of Jakarta EE 8 in September 2019, we have witnessed meteoric growth for Jakarta EE, both in its use by developers and the certification of compatible products based on its specifications," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. "Jakarta EE 8 has seen more certifications of Full Platform Compatible Products in 8 months than Java EE 8 had in over 2 years. With Jakarta EE 9 on track for release in fall of this year, the real work on innovation and the transition to cloud native Java and microservices support can begin."

The 2020 Jakarta EE Developer Survey received 19% more responses than last year's survey.

The survey results in their entirety can be found here.

The results show significantly increased growth in the use of Jakarta EE 8 and interest in cloud-native Java overall.

A list of the key findings from this survey include:

• Java/Jakarta EE 8 hits the mainstream with 55% adoption among the developers surveyed.
• Spring/Spring Boot continues to be the leading framework for building cloud native applications, but its share declined 13% (from 57% in 2019 to 44% in 2020).
• With the delivery of Jakarta EE 8 in September 2019, Jakarta EE starts to fulfill its promise of accelerating business application development for the cloud, emerging as the second place cloud native framework with 35% usage in this year's survey.
• Since its announcement early in 2019, the adoption of Red Hat's Quarkus has skyrocketed with 16% of developers now using the framework.
• The overall usage of the microservices architecture for implementing Java systems in the cloud technically declined since last year (39% in 2020 vs 43% in 2019). This could potentially be due to implementers realizing that microservices are not a "one size fits all" solution, which is further borne out by the use of the monolithic architecture approach doubling since last year with 25% adoption reported in 2020.
• Even with the generally flat use of microservices year-over-year, there is still continued interest from the Jakarta EE community for better support for microservices in the platform. Combined with the decline in adoption of Spring Boot and the rise of Jakarta EE, the takeaway here may be that developers are looking past single vendor microservices frameworks in favor of vendor-neutral standards for building Java microservices.
• The adoption of Eclipse Che, an open source, Java-based developer workspace server and cloud Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for creating cloud native, enterprise applications on Kubernetes, has surged with reported usage growing from 4% in 2019 to 11% in 2020.
• Java 11 use has surged to 28% (20% in 2019). Sitting at 11% usage, enterprises are also adopting Java 14. Java 14 uptake may be due to the cloud providers are looking to stay on the latest and greatest
• Java 8 adoption has decreased to 64% (84% in 2019). This is an indicator that developers are finally moving away from Java 8 and Java 11 is replacing Java 8 as the default Java.

Posted by John K. Waters on June 25, 2020