What Java Developers Want in 2022: Migration to Java 17 and Emerging Trends

JRebel released the 2022 Java Developer Productivity Report, analyzing a survey of 876 Java professionals conducted from October 2021 to January 2022.

The respondents were primarily developers (≈50%) and Java architects, together representing about 70% of the sample; leadership roles accounted for 15% and the rest were managers. Most participants worked at large enterprises (31% with >1000 employees), followed by medium‑size firms (27%), small companies (20%) and startups (12%).

The report provides up‑to‑date data on the Java ecosystem, covering microservice adoption, CI/CD build times, commit frequency, popular frameworks, application servers, virtual machines and other tools, as well as overall developer productivity, challenges and obstacles.

Most Java developers plan to migrate to the latest long‑term‑support (LTS) version, with 62% intending to switch within the next 12 months. Java 8 remains the most used version (37%), followed by Java 11 (29%); together they account for the majority of production workloads, while only 12% use Java 12 or newer.

Long‑term support is the top factor influencing 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 adopt Java 17 than large enterprises, likely due to the higher complexity and cost of upgrading large Java applications.

The survey also examined adoption of commercial versus open Java distributions: 36% use Oracle Java, 27% use OpenJDK, and 16% use AdoptOpenJDK/Adoptium. The report notes that large organizations often prefer commercial JRE/JDKs for easier patch and update management.

Microservices are the dominant architecture for Java applications (32%), with monolithic apps at 22% and serverless at 8%. Spring Boot is the leading microservice framework, used by 74% of respondents.

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

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