JVM Ecosystem Report 2021

AdoptOpenJDK builds of OpenJDK most popular in production

AdoptOpenJDK builds of OpenJDK used by 44% of Java Developers

It is interesting to see that 44.1% of respondents use the free AdoptOpenJDK distribution in production, making it the most prevalent in our survey. However, we can also see that Oracle is still a big player in the market, with 28% for their OpenJDK build and 23% for the commercial Oracle JDK.

JDKs in production

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

AdoptOpenJDK builds of OpenJDK

Oracle OpenJDK

Oracle JDK

Azul Zulu builds of OpenJDK

Amazon Corretto builds of OpenJDK

The Linux Distro’s bundled OpenJDK package

Red Hat builds of openJDK

Oracle GraalVM Community Edition

IBM Java SDK

Azul Zing

Alibaba Dragonwell builds of OpenJDK

Bellsoft Liberica builds of OpenJDK

Eclipse Adoptium builds of OpenJDK

Oracle GraalVM Enterprise Edition

SAP SapMachine builds of OpenJDK

HP-UX Java

Other

None

Developers moving away from Java 8 to Java 11

Over 60% of developers use Java SE 11 in production.

We found out that 40% of the survey participants use more than one Java version in production. Because of this, we can also conclude that more people than we realized do upgrade to versions beyond 8. Currently, 61.5% are using Java 11 in production, and almost 12% are using the latest release, which was Java 15 during the survey. This shows that developers do upgrade their Java version beyond Java 8.

JDK versions in production environments

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

6 or below

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Kotlin most important language on the JVM after Java

Java most popular with 91%, Kotlin second with almost 18%

While the variety of JVM languages grew over the last couple of years, Java is very much on top. With over 90% of developers using Java, we can see that it remains a very popular language. The popularity of Kotlin is more extensive than we thought last year. With an impressive 17.7% of the developers using Kotlin in production.

JVM languages used for applications in production

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Java

Kotlin

Groovy

Scala

Clojure

JRuby

Other

Download the full report

This comprehensive Java 2021 report reflects the state of the JVM ecosystem. Our full JVM Ecosystem 2021 report has more details on what developers are using, the difference between development and production, and how developers adopt newer versions of Java.

Download the full report

IntelliJ IDEA most dominant IDE in the Java Ecosystem

Over 70% of JVM developers use IntelliJ IDEA

For years, we’ve seen the dominance of JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA in the Java ecosystem. This year is not any different. IntelliJ IDEA is the most widely used within the JVM community. Also, the adoption of Visual Studio Code and Apache Netbeans grew tremendously.

We found out that more than half of the JVM community sees fit for multiple IDEs.

Most popular IDEs

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

IntelliJ IDEA

Eclipse IDE

Visual Studio Code

Vi/Vim/Emacs/ect

Apache NetBeans

Android Studio

Oracle JDeveloper

Other

Maven most popular build system for the Java ecosystem

More than 76% of the JVM developers use Maven to build their applications

Maven is still the number one build system for the Java ecosystem. With more than 76% of developers using Maven, it is even higher than in last year’s survey. Gradle is comfortably holding second place with 38.1%, also scoring higher than it did last year.

Tools for building applications

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

Maven

Gradle

Ant

SBT

Other

None

Spring still dominates the Java Ecosystem

Spring Boot and Spring MVC are the most dominant frameworks for the JVM

The Java world is still a Spring-dominated world, with over half of the market using Spring Boot and almost a third using Spring MVC. In general, we see that we live in a highly Spring-dominated universe, which appears to indicate that the Spring folks are doing a great job serving the community.

Application frameworks

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

Spring Boot

Spring MVC

Java EE

Jakarta EE

Quarkus

JSF

Micro Profile

Micronaut

GWT

Dropwizard

Struts

Vaadin

JHipster

Play

Grails

Wicket

Other

None

A word about our survey

This report presents the results of the largest annual survey on the state of the JVM ecosystem. The survey was conducted over a period of six weeks through February and March 2021, gathering the responses of over 2000 Java developers.

This year’s survey is a cooperation between Snyk and Azul and was slightly different from the previous surveys. We aimed for the survey to be more concise and focus only on the most important aspects of JVM developers today. Additionally, this year every participant was allowed to choose multiple options. We believe that the way the 2021 survey was designed, we have a better and more comprehensive view of the current JVM ecosystem. You can find all demographic information in the report.