State of Java Report: Developers Move Away from Java 8 as Apache Spark Gains Ground
Azul has published its 2025 State of Java report, showing that enterprises are working hard to upgrade applications from Java 8, and struggle with security issues both in the form of the three-year old Log4j vulnerability, and with the constant flow of security warnings, many of which prove to be false positives.
The report is based on responses from 2,039 Java professionals from companies of all sizes. Among respondents, 68 percent said that more than half their applications are built with Java or run on a JVM. The researchers state that this shows the continuing strength of Java in the enterprise, which we do not doubt, though there may also be an element of self-selection. The more general (and larger) StackOverflow developer survey shows Java in use by 30 percent of professional developers, just ahead of Microsoft's C#, and behind JavaScript, Python and TypeScript; while a recent JetBrains survey put Java usage at 46 percent, behind JavaScript and Python.
When Java 11 was released in 2018, upgrading was held back by the difficulty in migrating from the previous long-term support (LTS) release, Java 8, thanks to removed and deprecated packages. The previous State of Java report was in late 2023, at which point Java 8 was still in use by 40 percent of respondents. That figure has now dropped to 23 percent, showing strong progress. The survey also shows that most organizations are still with LTS releases. The most used version is Java 17 LTS (released in 2021), followed by 2023's Java 21 LTS.
The survey includes a question about Java-based infrastructures, meaning tools and services. In 2023 Apache Kafka, an event streaming platform, was the most used at 42 percent. The latest survey shows Kafka in 3rd place, with 28 percent usage, while Apache Spark tops the list with 35 percent. Spark is used for data science and machine learning, with the results showing perhaps the rising importance of AI processing. The researchers are also keen to note that in Java-oriented companies, both Java and JavaScript are ahead of Python for AI programming.
Spring Boot remains the most popular microservices framework, but not by much. In 2023, Spring Boot enjoyed 61 percent usage but in the current survey it was 42 percent, just ahead of Micronaut at 39 percent.
Security issues occupy much developer and DevOps time. 41 percent said that critical production Java-related security issues crop up at least weekly; and 33 percent of respondents said that more than half their DevOps is wasted on false positives. That said, researching a security vulnerability that proves to be a false positive is not really wasted time, though tools could also be to blame for raising too many such issues.
The Log4Shell vulnerability in popular logging library Log4j, discovered in 2021, continues to be an issue, with 49 percent of respondents stating that they still experience Log4j security vulnerabilities.
Finally, the introduction to the report states that "improvements in Java tooling, such as enhanced Visual Studio Code integration, provide developers with more accessible and efficient workloads." It is an intriguing comment, since the survey for some reason does not cover developer tools. In March 2024, Oracle released its own VS Code extension for Java, stating that the existing Red Hat extension was "not very good." There is some evidence that developers agree. The Oracle Java extension has 5 stars and good reviews, though only 2.1 million installs, versus 3.5 stars and mixed reviews for Red Hat's offering, despite 42 million installs. Perhaps Oracle, constantly under fire in Azul's report for its pricing, has done something right for VS Code users. muc muc muc