New Relic has released its fourth State of the Java Ecosystem report. Based on data from hundreds of thousands of applications, the report provides insights into the current state of the Java ecosystem, including how developers use it and the most-used Java versions in production.
Despite being introduced nearly 20 years ago, Java owes its continuing popularity to its scalability and portability, allowing users to run on any device with a Java virtual machine. Java has strong community support with Oracle supporting a forum for questions and a tutorial website. Oracle releases new Java versions every six months and new Java long-term-support versions every two years. The new long-term support versions include updates to help improve stability, security, and performance, which developers often cite as one of the most important factors for upgrading Java versions.
Key findings from the report include;
- Java 21 sees higher adoption than Java 17;
- Java 17 overtakes Java 11 as the most-used LTS version;
- Eclipse Adoptium steadily gains traction as one of the most popular JDK vendors; and
- Log4j and Bouncy Castle are the most popular logging framework and encryption library.
The report also canvasses the most common types of Java-related questions and requests asked by developers who are using the New Relic AI generative AI observability assistant, including how-to type questions, querying for a specific metric, and troubleshooting.
You can read the full report here.
