The State of Java Productivity in 2023

The State of Java Productivity in 2023

Now in its 11th year, the annual Java Developer Report (from JRebel by Perforce) paints a picture of how Java developers, architects, and team leads are using what continues to be a prevalent programming language. Topics covered by the survey of over 400 Java professionals worldwide included the technology tools they use, emerging trends, and some of the challenges they continue to face.

First, some good news: 63% of respondents say their organisations intend to add Java developers. This underlines that, despite global economic climates, there is an awareness of the need to find people with appropriate Java skills. New developers might take this as an indication that Java should be on their resumes. In parallel, 44% of organisations also intend to increase their budgets for Java development tools.

Java versions and upgrade plans

Java 8 is the most widely used programming language for the survey participants’ primary applications (31%), closely followed by Java 11 (28%) and Java 17 (19%), with 6% using Java 18 or newer. With over half of all respondents using more recent versions of Java, this is an encouraging sign of a greater move away from legacy versions and becoming more in tune with the new cadence of releases within the Java ecosystem. Looking ahead, this trend bodes well for the adoption of Java 20, which was released in March.

The survey also asked Java professionals what influenced their decisions to upgrade Java Developer Kit (JDK) versions. Long-term support (LTS) scored highest at 25%, followed by security (24%), access to new features (18%), performance (17%) and compliance (15%). That LTS and security between them comprise around half of all responses, shows a desire to minimise risk exposure. This is no surprise, especially with Oracle dropping active support for Java 8 approximately one year ago.

Application Architecture

Microservice-based applications are the most popular at 32%, with almost a third of all applications fully microservices-based. The number of microservices per application varies. 17% have over 20, but over a quarter have only between one and five microservices, which might indicate that these are really monoliths sprinkled with some microservices to make them sound more modern.

In addition, it was interesting to discover that 8% have reverted away from microservices and back to monolithic applications, which account for 22% of all respondents. In third place were service-oriented architectures, at just 10%. Finally, desktop apps, mobile, and serverless accounted for 7% each.

Saison Start 2023

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Cloud, IDEs, and more technology choices

Among those who are using the cloud, AWS is used by precisely one-quarter of respondents, with Azure in the second spot at 15%, with IBM Cloud on the rise compared to last year at 13%. Red Hat comes in fourth at 12%.

Tomcat remains the leading application server for Java application development (44%). However, it is interesting to note that WebSphere took second place, a growth compared to previous years, and the reason for this remains unclear.

Once again, the top integrated development environment (IDE) is Intellij IDEA, accounting for 42% of all the survey responses. Eclipse was quoted by just over a quarter, closely followed by VS Code, which — while growing in use — is done so alongside more established IDEs, reflecting that developers increasingly use several to keep pace with different development demands.

Productivity challenges

The survey also took a look at some of the difficulties they face daily. For instance, around half find that the start-up time of their applications has increased since it was created, and the time it takes to deploy containerised environments remotely takes over five minutes in almost 50% of cases.

In addition, redeployment times for Java applications continue to be hugely time-consuming, even more so than last year, with 27% reporting that the process takes ten or more minutes. Redeploy was also the third largest obstacle quoted by this year’s survey respondents, at 19%. The pain that redeploys continue to create is a concern, especially given that there are tools and techniques that can be used to mitigate or even remove the effort associated with redeploys altogether.

Beyond redeploys, the biggest single biggest obstacle that Java professionals mentioned was having too many tasks on their plates (43%), and clearly, this affects productivity. So, the survey also included a question about what participants would do if they had an extra 10% time available. While most people pointed to practical uses, such as adding new features or improving their development processes, it was also great to hear that extra time would contribute to taking breaks and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. After all, everyone deserves coffee time, not to mention lunch.

Despite all these challenges, the survey’s findings demonstrate that Java remains highly relevant in modern application development and — if the results are any indication to go by — will likely continue to be for some time.

To download a full copy of the report, please go to: https://www.jrebel.com/resources/java-developer-productivity-report-2023. (JRebel is part of Perforce)