2022 Java Developer Productivity Report Highlights Trends and Adoption

JRebel released the 2022 Java Developer Productivity Report, which explores the results of a global survey of Java developers conducted from October 2021 to January 2022, collecting 876 responses.

Respondents were mainly developers (nearly 50%) and Java architects (about 20%), together accounting for roughly 70% of participants; team leads made up 15% and other managerial roles were also represented. Most respondents worked for large enterprises, with 31% employed at companies with over 1,000 employees, 27% at mid‑size firms (100‑1,000 employees), 20% at small firms, and 12% at startups.

The report covers the current state of the Java ecosystem, including microservice adoption, CI/CD build times, submission frequency, popular frameworks, application servers, JVMs, and other tools, as well as overall developer productivity, challenges, and obstacles.

Survey results indicate that the majority of Java developers plan to migrate to the latest long‑term‑support (LTS) version within the next 12 months, with 62% intending to switch. Java 8 remains the most widely used version in production (37%), followed by Java 11 (29%); only 12% of developers use Java 12 or newer.

Long‑term support is the most influential factor for upgrade decisions (25%), followed by security (23%), performance (20%), new features (18%), and compliance (14%).

Companies with fewer than 100 employees are more likely to upgrade to Java 17 than larger enterprises, likely due to the complexity and cost of upgrading large Java applications.

Regarding Java distribution adoption, 36% of respondents use Oracle Java, 27% use OpenJDK, and 16% use AdoptOpenJDK/Adoptium. The report notes that commercial JRE/JDKs can simplify patching and updates for large organizations.

Microservices are the most popular architecture for Java applications (32%), while monolithic architectures account for 22% and serverless for 8%. Spring Boot is the leading microservice framework, used by 74% of respondents.

Docker is the most common virtual‑machine platform for Java applications (41% usage), followed by Kubernetes (26%) and VMware (16%). Amazon Web Services is the most widely used PaaS platform (31%).

Apache Tomcat remains the most popular Java application server (48% usage), with JBoss/WildFly at 15%. IntelliJ IDEA is the top Java IDE (48% of respondents), followed by Eclipse (24%) and Visual Studio Code (18%).

For the full report, visit: https://www.jrebel.com/resources/java-developer-productivity-report-2022 . The article invites readers to share their thoughts on whether they plan to upgrade to Java 17.

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