These questions were only shown to the developers who chose Java as one of their three primary programming languages.

Java

Java is the most used language in South Korea, China, and Germany. The Java share in South Korea is 53%, in China 47%, and in Germany 33%.

Which versions of Java do you regularly use?

It is not particularly surprising to find that Java 8 is the leading version of Java, as its usage in 2021 is relatively the same as it was in 2020. Java 11 has seen a stable increase of about 10 percentage points each year since 2019. The shares of Java 12 and Java 13 have decreased about threefold since 2020, while the newer Java 14 and Java 15 have already gained an audience despite them being relatively new.

What application servers do you regularly?

In general, the landscape of application servers is roughly the same in 2021 as it was in 2020, with Apache Tomcat being the most used among developers.

A higher share of developers who use Java among their primary languages have their development environments on Windows compared to non-Java developers.

Which frameworks do you use as an alternative to an application server, if any?

How do you package your web applications?

This question was only answered by respondents who used application servers or frameworks as alternatives to application servers.

Between 2020 and 2021, the usage of embedded servers grew by about 5 percentage points.

Which unit-testing frameworks do you use?

The usage of the two most popular unit-testing frameworks (JUnit and Mockito) grew slightly, by 2 percentage points, while the overall picture remained roughly the same.

What web frameworks do you use, if any?

The share of Spring Boot grew slightly in 2021, by about 4 percentage points, while overall there are many more new web frameworks used by small shares of developers than there were in 2020.

Which build systems do you regularly use, if any?

The overall picture of the build systems is roughly the same in 2021 as it was in 2020, with Maven and Gradle still the most popular among developers.

Which versions of Java Enterprise specifications do you regularly use, if any?

Which JVM profilers do you regularly use, if any?

In 2021, the most used JVM profiler is the suite of integrated profiling tools in IntelliJ IDEA, which is used by about one fourth of developers. The usage of other JVM profilers has decreased slightly.

Which IDE / editor do you use the most for Java development?

Despite all the measures we’ve taken to secure a representative pool of respondents, the results may be slightly shifted towards users of JetBrains products, as they are more likely to take the survey.

The usage rate of standalone IDEs is higher among Java developers than it is among non-Java developers.

In general, developers who use Java as one of their primary languages are more likely than non-Java developers to work in a company of more than 5,000 employees.

What types of software do you develop with Java?

The usage of Java for websites and IT infrastructure grew slightly between 2020 and 2021, while Java became less used for business intelligence / data science / machine learning.

This year, a greater proportion of Java developers attended formal institutions to become developers, while the proportion who studied on their own decreased.

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IntelliJ IDEA

The most intelligent Java IDE

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