Java Developers' Survey: JDK Choices, Spring Usage, and Tooling Trends

This report answers the following questions and more:

Which JDK vendor are you primarily using in production?

Have you paid for a JDK recently?

Who did you pay?

Since JDK 9, have changes in support and release cadence affected your decision to pay?

Will you consider paying for a JDK in the future?

Which JDK version does your project mainly use?

Why haven’t you upgraded to the latest JDK version?

Which language(s) in the JVM ecosystem does your application primarily use?

Which JDK vendor are you primarily using in production?

Since Oracle changed the JDK license, this question is crucial. The survey shows Oracle JDK remains the most used, but its market share has dropped 36% since 2018, while OpenJDK has grown by the same amount.

Have you paid for a JDK recently, and will you in the future?

Only 9% of users currently pay for a JDK. Most major JVM players—Alibaba, Google, and IntelliJ IDEA—use fully open-source OpenJDK, reducing the incentive to pay Oracle.

Among paying users, 55% pay Oracle, 17% RedHat, 16% IBM, and 12% Azul.

Future willingness to pay remains low, as shown in the following chart.

Which JDK version does your project mainly use?

Unsurprisingly, JDK 8 dominates, but JDK 11 users account for 25% of respondents.

Reasons for not upgrading: (1) current JDK works fine, (2) migration cost is high, (3) new features are not compelling.

How quickly would you upgrade JDK after a critical security issue?

61% would upgrade within a month, while 17% would not upgrade at all.

Which language(s) in the JVM ecosystem does your application primarily use?

Java dominates with 86.9% usage, followed by Kotlin, Scala, and others.

Spring framework adoption

About 60% of respondents use Spring in production, making it the dominant Java framework.

Spring version distribution: roughly half use 5.1.x, and two‑thirds use 5.x overall.

Other language usage

JavaScript leads front‑end development (62%), followed by SQL (44%) and Python (22%) for data science and ML.

Web framework usage

Client‑side frameworks: Angular, React, and jQuery are the top three. Server‑side frameworks are heavily dominated by Spring Boot and Spring MVC, together accounting for over 80% of usage.

Tooling usage

IDE: IntelliJ IDEA leads with over 60% market share, followed by Eclipse at ~20%.

Build tools: Maven dominates, with Gradle and Ant trailing.

Code repositories: GitLab > GitHub > BitBucket.

Role distribution

More than half of respondents are software developers, 21% are architects, and 14% are team leaders.