Java 17’s 430% One‑Year Surge: Key Takeaways from New Relic’s 2023 Report

New Relic 2023 Java Ecosystem Report Overview

New Relic released a 2023 report on the state of the Java ecosystem, analyzing data from millions of applications to reveal usage trends, popular JDK vendors, and the rise of containerization.

Java LTS Versions and Adoption

Java 11 remains the most widely used LTS version, with over 56% of production applications on it, up from 48% in 2022. Java 8 follows at about 33% , down from 46% in 2022.

Java 17 (released September 2021) has seen a remarkable surge, now used by more than 9% of production applications , representing a 430% growth rate within a single year, far outpacing the growth of Java 11 when it was first introduced.

Support for Java 7 ended in 2022, with only 0.28% of applications still using it, mainly legacy systems.

Enterprise Migration and Cloud‑Native Trends

According to the report, nearly three‑quarters of organizations plan to adopt Java 17 within the next year. Java is increasingly viewed as a cloud‑native technology, with many enterprises investing in modern architectures and migrating existing Java workloads to cloud environments.

Key drivers for modernization include maintainability and security risk reduction . About one‑third of Java applications are already deployed on major cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Application Types and Development Focus

Web applications constitute the largest share of Java workloads, while desktop applications account for only 18% of surveyed products. 70% of respondents intend to use new full‑stack Java applications, with backend development following closely.

Developers report focusing on modernizing existing applications (57%), building heterogeneous full‑stack solutions with Java and JavaScript/TypeScript (48%), migrating to the cloud (36%), and creating new front‑ends for Java back‑ends (29%).

Framework and Tooling Landscape

Among front‑end frameworks, Angular (37%) and React (32%) lead, followed by Vue (16%). On the backend, 79% of developers use Spring Boot , with 50% planning to increase its usage. Adoption of Vaadin Flow, Spring Framework, Quarkus, Hilla, and React is also expected to grow.

Alibaba Cloud’s Java Champion highlighted two parallel evolution lines for Java: the underlying JVM adapting to hardware architectures, and Java as a developer tool driving advances in cloud‑native, AI, and other domains.

Alibaba has open‑sourced EMT4J (Eclipse Migration Toolkit for Java) , a tool that helps migrate Java applications from Java 8 to Java 11 and Java 17, reflecting industry efforts to streamline upgrades.

Overall, Java remains a dominant programming language with a massive developer community, and the coming period is seen as a pivotal transformation window for the ecosystem.