Where and how-much Java technology used

What’s going on in Java these days?

Last year, we tackled two particular challenges that really matter to productive software organizations: software quality (got bugs?) and the predictability of delivery (last week or next year?). We learned a lot from that one!

But now we feel like it’s time to revisit the broader tools & technologies landscape in Java these days, collect some data, crunch some numbers and see what’s going on in the market at large. And what better way than  a huge leaderboard of tools and technologies currently running the show as of May 2014!!

As you can guess, in some categories multiple tools are often used in conjunction, so we allowed for multiple selections (denoted by *). For answers where a statistically significant portion (over 5%) of respondents selected “Do not use”, the responses have been normalized (denoted by º) to exclude non-user groups.

It probably comes as no surprise that among the 2164 developers we surveyed, Java SE 7 (65%) is used by two-thirds of developers, but even more are using JUnit (82.5%), the most-used single technology across the entire Java landscape. And a good thing too: unit testing is key for making sure your app gets out the door. Next is Jenkins (70%), our favorite Lord of the Butlers, which is used by nearly 3 out of 4 developers that use Continuous Integration tools (1 in 5 does not). We've seen distributed VCS come a long way in recent years, and Git (69%) is now non-exclusively used by over two-thirds of developers – often alongside Subversion (57%).

Taking in the next set of tech leaders really completes the Enterprise Java picture – Hibernate (67.5%), Maven and Nexus (64%), Tomcat (50%) and Eclipse (48%) gives you more or less a decent foundation of a basic, no frills enterprise development stack.

But don't think the last words have been had yet…because in this report we asked a few questions that directly highlight the feelings of developers towards certain technologies.