Every year, JRebel, a company that develops tools to make Java programming more efficient, conducts a survey. Developers from the USA, China and Europe are asked about the main industry trends: popular JDK versions, application architecture and build tools. In this text we have collected the main results of the survey.
Which JDK version do developers choose?
The majority of developers said they use Java 8 (37% of respondents) as the programming language in their main application. In second place in popularity is Java 11 (29% of developers). Next come Java 12 or a newer version (12% of developers) and Java 7 or an older version (5% of respondents). The programming languages Kotlin, Groovy and Scala were the least popular among developers, but in total 17% of developers from the total number of respondents use them.
Which JRE/JDK distributions do you prefer?
36% of respondents preferred Oracle to Java. Generic OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK/Adoptium round out the top three with 27% and 16% respectively. OpenLogic OpenJDK distributions are chosen by 2.3% of developers.
Trends in Java Application Architecture: Microservices and Monolithic Applications
The developers also spoke about the architecture of the applications they are developing. Microservices-based applications were the most popular (32%), followed by monolithic applications (22%). Modular-monolithic applications accounted for 13% of responses, and service-oriented architectures - 12%. Most of the companies participating in the study either have applications based entirely on microservices or are currently moving to a microservices architecture. Interestingly, larger companies (100+ employees) showed higher adoption of microservices at 36%, which is in stark contrast to smaller companies (under 100 employees) at 28%. Among the frameworks that developers use to work with microservices, the leader was the Spring Boot framework with an indicator of 74%. Frameworks Quarkus, Vert.x and DropWizard round out the top four with 5%, 2% and 1% respectively.
Java Developer Tools: Apache Tomcat and IntelliJ IDEA
According to the survey, Apache Tomcat has become the most popular application server for Java, with 48% of developers preferring it. Tomcat is followed by application servers JBoss/Wildfly (15%), Jetty (13%), WebLogic (7%), WebSphere (5%) and GlassFish (4%). Among the build tools, the Maven framework takes the lead - 68%. In second place is Gradle (23% of developers), and in third place is Ant (6%). In 2022, IntelliJ IDEA became the most popular IDE used for developing Java applications, with 48% of respondents choosing it as their preferred development environment. IntelliJ was followed by Eclipse (24%), VSCode (18%) and Netbeans (6%).
Most of the companies participating in the study either have applications based entirely on microservices or are currently moving to a microservices architecture. Interestingly, larger companies (100+ employees) showed higher adoption of microservices at 36%, which is in stark contrast to smaller companies (under 100 employees) at 28%. Among the frameworks that developers use to work with microservices, the leader was the Spring Boot framework with an indicator of 74%. 
Frameworks Quarkus, Vert.x and DropWizard round out the top four with 5%, 2% and 1% respectively.
Among the build tools, the Maven framework takes the lead - 68%. In second place is Gradle (23% of developers), and in third place is Ant (6%). In 2022, IntelliJ IDEA became the most popular IDE used for developing Java applications, with 48% of respondents choosing it as their preferred development environment. IntelliJ was followed by Eclipse (24%), VSCode (18%) and Netbeans (6%).
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