8 ms·

Java tools and technologieslandscape for 2014

68 points by lukaseder 12y ago

checksum404 12y ago
Looks like Scala is widening its adoption lead over Clojure. I think the latter is going to become a niche language for large-scale data processing, while the former takes its place as the next enterprise language.
- drcode 12y ago
  Same old story: Developers aren't interested in it if it isn't friendly to the old school OOP + MVC approach. If you give most professional developers something like Clojure, their first thought is "How do I architect a large application this way?" and they don't know the answer. (This is speaking as someone who thinks Clojure is the best language on the planet right now...)
  - bdavisx 12y ago
    So it sounds like Clojure needs a really comprehensive guide/book on how to architect a large application.
    - drcode 12y ago
      Agreed... but more than a book, more like a marketing campaign with some PR friendly buzzwords :-)
    - dominotw 12y ago
      I think it needs a 'killer app' like rails/hibernate etc which are compelling enough for me to look at a new language.
  - dminor 12y ago
    I think it probably has more to do with static typing than anything.
    - asdf1234 12y ago
      Bingo. Clojure gets a lot of things right, but there's a lot of us that find dynamic typing absolutely unacceptable.
  - benjaminpv 12y ago
    I find this to be true of a lot of promising new technologies. None of my day-to-day work is the kind of flashy/bleeding edge stuff that HN tends to cater to, but I'm always on the lookout for new tools that'll make things easier or more reliable. Oftentimes I'll go to evaluate something new only to find that their examples are the tried and true "get some tweets and do something with them" or "here's how you make yet another blog platform." Great. If my job consisted of making blogging platforms I might be interested. Show me how your product will free me from having to handle the drudgery of setting up yet another similar-yet-slightly-different form. Show me how your new framework makes it easier to do integration with several developers. Show me something that'll let me ease the technical debt we've accrued. That kind of thing.
  - hibikir 12y ago
    While I have absolutely no problem with your opinions on programming languages (or anyone's, for that matter), I do not believe you are being very accurate when representing the views of the majority of developers. When you give most professional developers something like clojure, they ask: Where are my objects? where are my types? Going back to a relatively typeless system and having to go to documentation to figure out what operations have been written for a data structure, instead of just pushing dot and seeing a bunch of them, is quite the cultural shock. It's really about the strengths of the language being things your average developer is relatively uninterested in. You pay the price of S expressions to make it easier to do metaprogramming. But what if you don't want to spend your time metaprogramming? Then suddenly what seem like strengths to some suddenly turn into weaknesses. Clojure has its niche, probably as a better alternative to R in scientific environments where metaprogramming can give you tremendous gains, but it doesn't really fit what most of us have to do in a daily basis any more than writing it all in C.
  - jeremiep 12y ago
    This was my initial struggle with Clojure too, trying to fit my existing world views into the language. It didn't take me long to realize my world views were completely wrong, not Clojure. Most developers don't want to learn, they want to ship. Even if this means reusing the same old school OOP+MVC approach and all the potential bugs and balls of muds it almost always creates over time. Yet this is what I like most about Clojure: the language makes it harder for you to write big balls of mud. If your design isn't simple to implement in Clojure, it's a pretty good sign it isn't such a good design to begin with. (I'm also someone who thinks Clojure is the best language right now)
- randomsearch 12y ago
  > Looks like Scala is widening its adoption lead over Clojure I agree that this is a very important and interesting topic, but how did you draw that conclusion from the survey? The question wasn't "Do you use Scala?" or "Do you use Clojure"? The way they phrased it was a bit confusing, actually. I don't think you can draw any conclusions about adoption rates of Clojure or Scala from this data.
- smrtinsert 12y ago
  It also shows Groovy over Clojure which can't possibly be true. I'm basing my disbelief on what my connections are working in in the dc area, literally no one works on Groovy unless they have to deal with Gradle.
  - meddlepal 12y ago
    Groovy gets a fair bit of mileage in Enterprise systems where something more flexible than Java for some component was preferred but still felt like Java was desired. I have also seen some startups using Groovy because of Grails. I use it often personally and it is my goto non-Java JVM language because it's easy to read, write and find people who can maintain whatever mess I create :P
  - vorg 12y ago
    The question they asked was... “If you had to choose just one additional JVM language to learn about, it would probably be..?” ...to which 47% replied Scala, 31% Groovy, and 12% Clojure.
heterogenic 12y ago
I'd love to see a comparison among the same sample set between Java8 & Scala as the next environment they're likely to use. Scala has been "the next big thing" for a while now, but I'm just not convinced that the Java ecosystem is looking for a next thing at all. To be clear: I absolutely agree that we can do better than Java, and though I prefer Clojure, Scala is certainly a step up. I'm just not convinced that the practical realities of its user base are enough to drive that change, which limits my willingness to move my organization in that direction.
thescrewdriver 12y ago
It's very interesting to see the data for what technologies Java developers are "really interested" in: Scala: 47% Java 8: 35% http://zeroturnaround.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/what-technologies-are-developers-interested-in.jpg http://zeroturnaround.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/what-te... Java developers seem really interested in Scala (more so than Java 8). I think the distinction which will come in when comparing technologies that developers want to use and are really interested in vs those that they will actually use given inertia of existing code and corporate adoption.
- pron 12y ago
  Those are answers to two very different questions, and the percentages aren't comparable. The Scala one asked what JVM language would you learn next, if you were to learn one, while Java 8 is the answer to the question: what is your top new-tech priority for 2015?
  - randomsearch 12y ago
    > Those were two different questions. The Scala one asked what JVM language would you learn next, if you were to learn one Indeed. I wonder if the result is a bit misleading, because many Java developers may not really have considered other languages, and Scala is the most well-publicised. So the question may just translate to "name another JVM language." Kinda reflects with Groovy too, which has been around quite a while now and does well in this question, despite not being very "popular" in the various language league tables.
    - thescrewdriver 12y ago
      The results for that question are very interesting too (although perhaps not that surprising). There was virtually no interesting in Xtend.
      - lukaseder 12y ago
        Can Xtend even be compiled to Java outside of Eclipse? I haven't been following recent improvements, but when I last checked, that wasn't possible. So it was essentially an in-IDE-only language, nice for little scripts, but completely useless for larger applications (or teams)
virtualwhys 12y ago
How on earth does Scala garner nearly 50% developer interest in the survey?? That's quite a surprise given the bashing Scala has taken of late (AKA the Paul Phillips Scala "tribute" tour), and the general thumbs down that Scala receives on HN, Reddit, etc. Kotlin should pick up some steam once a stable release comes around, they've done a good job cherry picking the best of Scala while avoiding the kitchen sink baggage that Scala hopes to shed somewhere down the road (with Scala 3 backed by Dotty[1]). Not sure about Clojure, certainly has a following, but is probably not going to appeal to the enterprise crowd, whereas Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon, etc. type safe and familiar-ish syntax languages will. Java 8 (and 9 to come) is the elephant in the room, hopefully won't crush alternate JVM language adoption, diversity's a good thing. [1] https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty
- kasey_junk 12y ago
  Until Kotlin or Ceylon get a stable release (or 2) under their belt there aren't a lot of alternatives for JVM developers that want strong typing without the baggage of Java. As a Scala developer I have a whole list of things I don't like, but Java 7 is a non-starter for me, and while Java 8 looks great, it is still missing a lot of features I want/need. I'd love to give other JVM languages a try but can't afford to go through the growing pains of early releases. Scala has gotten over that major hump at least.
- pron 12y ago
  > How on earth does Scala garner nearly 50% developer interest in the survey?? It doesn't. The question was: if you were to learn a new JVM language, what language would you learn first?
- thescrewdriver 12y ago
  I wouldn't read too much into enthusiastic Scala downvoting on the programming subreddit. It seems that most people I know who have used Scala love it, but there are those who don't who tend to be very vocal online. What is interesting is how many downvoters have never used Scala but have the Paul Phillips video bookmarked for every discussion where Scala is mentioned.
- 12y ago
yawz 12y ago
Am I wrong in assuming that the responders are JRebel users? I'm asking this question because I wonder how representative is this sample compared to the industry in general (I know, this could be asked about any survey, really). For instance, use of MySql with 32% seems too high to me, this, compared to what I've seen around. The main persistence solution of 1 out of 3 of my connections is not MySQL.
- jbooth 12y ago
  MySQL is the default sane choice for anything not 'big data' that was started before the year 2010 or so, and hasn't exactly disappeared since then.
  - cgh 12y ago
    Was there something wrong with PostgreSQL before 2010? We used it and I thought it was pretty great (still do) but maybe I'm missing something.
    - jbooth 12y ago
      I wasn't using it, but it had a reputation for being slow and for the replication being considerably more broken than MySQL's -- apparently both of those have come a long way since.
    - lmm 12y ago
      It was hard to install for shared hosting, so most aspiring developers became familiar with MySQL first, with resulting network effects. The client was a bit harder to use (\x commands are harder to memorize than mysql's "SHOW TABLE" and felt sluggish in a local environment (something that's no longer the case AIUI)). Replication was a third party addon at the time, and had a reputation for being hairy, though I don't have direct experience.
- benjaminpv 12y ago
  That's a great point. JRebel's the kind of tool I imagine a lot of middle-sized (not startup sized, not yet enterprise) codebases probably haven't evaluated, so I'd imagine it's tied to MySQL being a frequent choice for new apps and the quick choice for a one-off internal app in the enterprise. While this is anecdotal, like you I've find the DBs most of the Java apps I encounter aren't MySQL, but a mix of Postgres, MSSQL and Oracle.
applecore 12y ago
It's interesting to see the popularity of testing frameworks, continuous integration, and static code analysis in the Java community. What do people think about Gradle as a build tool (versus Maven)?
- jebblue 12y ago
  Personally I don't like the look of the code for Gradle. make, Ant and Maven I get, prefer Ant.
- lmm 12y ago
  Maven is wonderful because it means I can pick up any Java project and there will be no surprises in how it builds; it simply won't allow your project to be a special snowflake with its own weird rules. I wish the community would cherish this and stop writing tools that make it possible to set up more complicated builds.
  - vorg 12y ago
    From the article... > In the past, Maven (64%) and Ant + Ivy (16.5%) have been more or less neck and neck. Indeed, we believe that many developers often use both in different ways on complex projects – in 2012, 67% of respondents used Maven and 48% used Ant. [...] Ant with or without Ivy is only one-third as commonplace as it was reported in 2012. The rapid increase of Gradle (11%) is also interesting to witness. Since 2012, Gradle use has more than doubled The 2014 question was what build tool is used most often, whereas the 2012 figures are for what build tool was used, with some overlap. So Maven use has stayed high for those using it, whereas Ant users have either given up on it, use Maven more often, or have switched to Gradle (which is still Ant). I wouldn't trust the download numbers given by the Gradleware CEO, though. The Groovy ecosystem has a long history of fabricating numbers, e.g. look at https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics and see 865,000 downloads of Groovy in the past month, then click on country and see 822,000 of them are from China, and only 17,000 from the US.
- MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
  I've used Ant, Gradle and Maven - they all suck, but in different ways. Maven is too restrictive and its XML too verbose, but Gradle can turn to spaghetti code, its DSL is often hard to debug and sometimes under-documented, and could be faster imho. Maybe one day Gradle will suck less than Maven, but currently I think they're about the same.
thescrewdriver 12y ago
Also interesting to see Java apps by type according to the survey: Web applications: 71% Libs and frameworks: 15% Desktops: 11% Mobile: 3% I'm surprised mobile is so low given that Java is what's used to write Android apps.
- pron 12y ago
  I think that's more of a reflection of the RebelLabs blog readership than the Java developer community at large. Their products as well as their blog, are geared mostly to web developers.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  It either means Android makes up only a small percentage of the total Java market... or the group used to create these statistics is not representative of the Java developer world as a whole.
- DCKing 12y ago
  I doubt Android is counted in here at all. It's really a different beast compared to regular Java. This 'mobile' figure could be explained by Java Mobile Edition developers alone.
- snambi 12y ago
  for some strange reason, java developers (web, framework) are not much aware of android.
jebblue 12y ago
Slide 3 doesn't speak for me except for Java 8. I've looked at Scala, don't like the syntax, give me heartburn like trying to look at Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby or Haskell. Eclipse so totally rocks, it beats the $1000+ cost of Visual Studio and Intellij isn't even in my rear view mirror. Gradle, syntax does not work in my brain, I get the same feeling as when looking at the languages I mentioned earlier. Give me make, Ant and/or Maven (though you have to be careful to keep Maven on a short leash).
vorg 12y ago
From the end of the article... The TL;DR version for efficient readers Java versions – Adoption since 2012 of the newest Java versions has been strong, namely growth in Java SE 7 and Java EE 6…the fact that certain older version of Java SE and EE still command decent minorities is a bit odd, but nothing to fear. IDEs – Eclipse is a very stable market leader, but increasing favor and interest in IntelliJ IDEA may eventually equalize things. Alternative JVM languages – Scala is the most interesting, enterprise-ready language on the JVM, and Groovy & Clojure play a great counterpart to the non-Java coding movement. Build tools – Maven’s dominance is now unquestioned with Ant’s decline from previous years, although fast-growing Gradle is extremely interesting to respondents. Application servers – Open-source players like Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty and GlassFish dominate both production and development environments, which use the same technology for 81% of respondents, although it’s clear that development-only app servers in the highest favor are Jetty, Tomcat & TomEE. Web frameworks – A mature and fragmented market, over 1/3 of developers use more than 1 web framework, and here Spring MVC is still king in this area, with stable JSF and growing Vaadin following Object-relational mapping frameworks – When it comes to ORM, Hibernate takes the cake, although other technologies are available and in common use in parallel. Code analysis tools – Although nearly 1/3 of developers don’t use these tools (big mistake), the market is rich with complementary technologies like FindBugs, CheckStyle and a platform to bring it all together, SonarQube. Continuous Integration (CI) servers – Jenkins’ dominance here is stronger than ever, yet 1 in 5 developers still don’t use CI as a practice. Databases: SQL and NoSQL – The mature SQL is dominated by Oracle, but the market has a good mix of free/open-source and proprietary offerings from long-time players. NoSQL is a maturing segment that is mainly driven by MongoDB. Version Control Systems (VCS) – Git, supported by the headline-worthy GitHub, is finally reigning supreme over Mercurial as a distributed VCS, and is often used in parallel with the legacy Subversion (SVN). Repositories – A maturing market that still needs a lot of adoption by developers, the legacy market leader Nexus is losing ground to JFrog’s Artifactory. Testing frameworks – In this area, complementary technologies work better together rather than competing, with unit testing, mocking and browser testing all highly practiced using strong tools like JUnit, Mockito and Selenium respectively. Priorities for 2015 – Java 8 (obviously), Continous Delivery / Deployment and Non-Java programming using alternative JVM languages are the 3 top priorities for the next year according to respondents.

68 points by lukaseder 12y ago

Looks like Scala is widening its adoption lead over Clojure. I think the latter is going to become a niche language for large-scale data processing, while the former takes its place as the next enterprise language.

drcode 12y ago
Same old story: Developers aren't interested in it if it isn't friendly to the old school OOP + MVC approach. If you give most professional developers something like Clojure, their first thought is "How do I architect a large application this way?" and they don't know the answer. (This is speaking as someone who thinks Clojure is the best language on the planet right now...)
- bdavisx 12y ago
  So it sounds like Clojure needs a really comprehensive guide/book on how to architect a large application.
  - drcode 12y ago
    Agreed... but more than a book, more like a marketing campaign with some PR friendly buzzwords :-)
  - dominotw 12y ago
    I think it needs a 'killer app' like rails/hibernate etc which are compelling enough for me to look at a new language.
- dminor 12y ago
  I think it probably has more to do with static typing than anything.
  - asdf1234 12y ago
    Bingo. Clojure gets a lot of things right, but there's a lot of us that find dynamic typing absolutely unacceptable.
- benjaminpv 12y ago
  I find this to be true of a lot of promising new technologies. None of my day-to-day work is the kind of flashy/bleeding edge stuff that HN tends to cater to, but I'm always on the lookout for new tools that'll make things easier or more reliable. Oftentimes I'll go to evaluate something new only to find that their examples are the tried and true "get some tweets and do something with them" or "here's how you make yet another blog platform." Great. If my job consisted of making blogging platforms I might be interested. Show me how your product will free me from having to handle the drudgery of setting up yet another similar-yet-slightly-different form. Show me how your new framework makes it easier to do integration with several developers. Show me something that'll let me ease the technical debt we've accrued. That kind of thing.
- hibikir 12y ago
  While I have absolutely no problem with your opinions on programming languages (or anyone's, for that matter), I do not believe you are being very accurate when representing the views of the majority of developers. When you give most professional developers something like clojure, they ask: Where are my objects? where are my types? Going back to a relatively typeless system and having to go to documentation to figure out what operations have been written for a data structure, instead of just pushing dot and seeing a bunch of them, is quite the cultural shock. It's really about the strengths of the language being things your average developer is relatively uninterested in. You pay the price of S expressions to make it easier to do metaprogramming. But what if you don't want to spend your time metaprogramming? Then suddenly what seem like strengths to some suddenly turn into weaknesses. Clojure has its niche, probably as a better alternative to R in scientific environments where metaprogramming can give you tremendous gains, but it doesn't really fit what most of us have to do in a daily basis any more than writing it all in C.
- jeremiep 12y ago
  This was my initial struggle with Clojure too, trying to fit my existing world views into the language. It didn't take me long to realize my world views were completely wrong, not Clojure. Most developers don't want to learn, they want to ship. Even if this means reusing the same old school OOP+MVC approach and all the potential bugs and balls of muds it almost always creates over time. Yet this is what I like most about Clojure: the language makes it harder for you to write big balls of mud. If your design isn't simple to implement in Clojure, it's a pretty good sign it isn't such a good design to begin with. (I'm also someone who thinks Clojure is the best language right now)
randomsearch 12y ago
> Looks like Scala is widening its adoption lead over Clojure I agree that this is a very important and interesting topic, but how did you draw that conclusion from the survey? The question wasn't "Do you use Scala?" or "Do you use Clojure"? The way they phrased it was a bit confusing, actually. I don't think you can draw any conclusions about adoption rates of Clojure or Scala from this data.
smrtinsert 12y ago
It also shows Groovy over Clojure which can't possibly be true. I'm basing my disbelief on what my connections are working in in the dc area, literally no one works on Groovy unless they have to deal with Gradle.
- meddlepal 12y ago
  Groovy gets a fair bit of mileage in Enterprise systems where something more flexible than Java for some component was preferred but still felt like Java was desired. I have also seen some startups using Groovy because of Grails. I use it often personally and it is my goto non-Java JVM language because it's easy to read, write and find people who can maintain whatever mess I create :P
- vorg 12y ago
  The question they asked was... “If you had to choose just one additional JVM language to learn about, it would probably be..?” ...to which 47% replied Scala, 31% Groovy, and 12% Clojure.

heterogenic 12y ago

I'd love to see a comparison among the same sample set between Java8 & Scala as the next environment they're likely to use. Scala has been "the next big thing" for a while now, but I'm just not convinced that the Java ecosystem is looking for a next thing at all. To be clear: I absolutely agree that we can do better than Java, and though I prefer Clojure, Scala is certainly a step up. I'm just not convinced that the practical realities of its user base are enough to drive that change, which limits my willingness to move my organization in that direction.

thescrewdriver 12y ago

It's very interesting to see the data for what technologies Java developers are "really interested" in: Scala: 47% Java 8: 35% http://zeroturnaround.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/what-technologies-are-developers-interested-in.jpg http://zeroturnaround.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/what-te... Java developers seem really interested in Scala (more so than Java 8). I think the distinction which will come in when comparing technologies that developers want to use and are really interested in vs those that they will actually use given inertia of existing code and corporate adoption.

pron 12y ago
Those are answers to two very different questions, and the percentages aren't comparable. The Scala one asked what JVM language would you learn next, if you were to learn one, while Java 8 is the answer to the question: what is your top new-tech priority for 2015?
- randomsearch 12y ago
  > Those were two different questions. The Scala one asked what JVM language would you learn next, if you were to learn one Indeed. I wonder if the result is a bit misleading, because many Java developers may not really have considered other languages, and Scala is the most well-publicised. So the question may just translate to "name another JVM language." Kinda reflects with Groovy too, which has been around quite a while now and does well in this question, despite not being very "popular" in the various language league tables.
  - thescrewdriver 12y ago
    The results for that question are very interesting too (although perhaps not that surprising). There was virtually no interesting in Xtend.
    - lukaseder 12y ago
      Can Xtend even be compiled to Java outside of Eclipse? I haven't been following recent improvements, but when I last checked, that wasn't possible. So it was essentially an in-IDE-only language, nice for little scripts, but completely useless for larger applications (or teams)

virtualwhys 12y ago

How on earth does Scala garner nearly 50% developer interest in the survey?? That's quite a surprise given the bashing Scala has taken of late (AKA the Paul Phillips Scala "tribute" tour), and the general thumbs down that Scala receives on HN, Reddit, etc. Kotlin should pick up some steam once a stable release comes around, they've done a good job cherry picking the best of Scala while avoiding the kitchen sink baggage that Scala hopes to shed somewhere down the road (with Scala 3 backed by Dotty[1]). Not sure about Clojure, certainly has a following, but is probably not going to appeal to the enterprise crowd, whereas Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon, etc. type safe and familiar-ish syntax languages will. Java 8 (and 9 to come) is the elephant in the room, hopefully won't crush alternate JVM language adoption, diversity's a good thing. [1] https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty

kasey_junk 12y ago
Until Kotlin or Ceylon get a stable release (or 2) under their belt there aren't a lot of alternatives for JVM developers that want strong typing without the baggage of Java. As a Scala developer I have a whole list of things I don't like, but Java 7 is a non-starter for me, and while Java 8 looks great, it is still missing a lot of features I want/need. I'd love to give other JVM languages a try but can't afford to go through the growing pains of early releases. Scala has gotten over that major hump at least.
pron 12y ago
> How on earth does Scala garner nearly 50% developer interest in the survey?? It doesn't. The question was: if you were to learn a new JVM language, what language would you learn first?
thescrewdriver 12y ago
I wouldn't read too much into enthusiastic Scala downvoting on the programming subreddit. It seems that most people I know who have used Scala love it, but there are those who don't who tend to be very vocal online. What is interesting is how many downvoters have never used Scala but have the Paul Phillips video bookmarked for every discussion where Scala is mentioned.
12y ago

yawz 12y ago

Am I wrong in assuming that the responders are JRebel users? I'm asking this question because I wonder how representative is this sample compared to the industry in general (I know, this could be asked about any survey, really). For instance, use of MySql with 32% seems too high to me, this, compared to what I've seen around. The main persistence solution of 1 out of 3 of my connections is not MySQL.

jbooth 12y ago
MySQL is the default sane choice for anything not 'big data' that was started before the year 2010 or so, and hasn't exactly disappeared since then.
- cgh 12y ago
  Was there something wrong with PostgreSQL before 2010? We used it and I thought it was pretty great (still do) but maybe I'm missing something.
  - jbooth 12y ago
    I wasn't using it, but it had a reputation for being slow and for the replication being considerably more broken than MySQL's -- apparently both of those have come a long way since.
  - lmm 12y ago
    It was hard to install for shared hosting, so most aspiring developers became familiar with MySQL first, with resulting network effects. The client was a bit harder to use (\x commands are harder to memorize than mysql's "SHOW TABLE" and felt sluggish in a local environment (something that's no longer the case AIUI)). Replication was a third party addon at the time, and had a reputation for being hairy, though I don't have direct experience.
benjaminpv 12y ago
That's a great point. JRebel's the kind of tool I imagine a lot of middle-sized (not startup sized, not yet enterprise) codebases probably haven't evaluated, so I'd imagine it's tied to MySQL being a frequent choice for new apps and the quick choice for a one-off internal app in the enterprise. While this is anecdotal, like you I've find the DBs most of the Java apps I encounter aren't MySQL, but a mix of Postgres, MSSQL and Oracle.

applecore 12y ago

It's interesting to see the popularity of testing frameworks, continuous integration, and static code analysis in the Java community. What do people think about Gradle as a build tool (versus Maven)?

jebblue 12y ago
Personally I don't like the look of the code for Gradle. make, Ant and Maven I get, prefer Ant.
lmm 12y ago
Maven is wonderful because it means I can pick up any Java project and there will be no surprises in how it builds; it simply won't allow your project to be a special snowflake with its own weird rules. I wish the community would cherish this and stop writing tools that make it possible to set up more complicated builds.
- vorg 12y ago
  From the article... > In the past, Maven (64%) and Ant + Ivy (16.5%) have been more or less neck and neck. Indeed, we believe that many developers often use both in different ways on complex projects – in 2012, 67% of respondents used Maven and 48% used Ant. [...] Ant with or without Ivy is only one-third as commonplace as it was reported in 2012. The rapid increase of Gradle (11%) is also interesting to witness. Since 2012, Gradle use has more than doubled The 2014 question was what build tool is used most often, whereas the 2012 figures are for what build tool was used, with some overlap. So Maven use has stayed high for those using it, whereas Ant users have either given up on it, use Maven more often, or have switched to Gradle (which is still Ant). I wouldn't trust the download numbers given by the Gradleware CEO, though. The Groovy ecosystem has a long history of fabricating numbers, e.g. look at https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics and see 865,000 downloads of Groovy in the past month, then click on country and see 822,000 of them are from China, and only 17,000 from the US.
MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
I've used Ant, Gradle and Maven - they all suck, but in different ways. Maven is too restrictive and its XML too verbose, but Gradle can turn to spaghetti code, its DSL is often hard to debug and sometimes under-documented, and could be faster imho. Maybe one day Gradle will suck less than Maven, but currently I think they're about the same.

thescrewdriver 12y ago

Also interesting to see Java apps by type according to the survey: Web applications: 71% Libs and frameworks: 15% Desktops: 11% Mobile: 3% I'm surprised mobile is so low given that Java is what's used to write Android apps.

pron 12y ago
I think that's more of a reflection of the RebelLabs blog readership than the Java developer community at large. Their products as well as their blog, are geared mostly to web developers.
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
It either means Android makes up only a small percentage of the total Java market... or the group used to create these statistics is not representative of the Java developer world as a whole.
DCKing 12y ago
I doubt Android is counted in here at all. It's really a different beast compared to regular Java. This 'mobile' figure could be explained by Java Mobile Edition developers alone.
snambi 12y ago
for some strange reason, java developers (web, framework) are not much aware of android.

jebblue 12y ago

Slide 3 doesn't speak for me except for Java 8. I've looked at Scala, don't like the syntax, give me heartburn like trying to look at Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby or Haskell. Eclipse so totally rocks, it beats the $1000+ cost of Visual Studio and Intellij isn't even in my rear view mirror. Gradle, syntax does not work in my brain, I get the same feeling as when looking at the languages I mentioned earlier. Give me make, Ant and/or Maven (though you have to be careful to keep Maven on a short leash).

vorg 12y ago

From the end of the article... The TL;DR version for efficient readers Java versions – Adoption since 2012 of the newest Java versions has been strong, namely growth in Java SE 7 and Java EE 6…the fact that certain older version of Java SE and EE still command decent minorities is a bit odd, but nothing to fear. IDEs – Eclipse is a very stable market leader, but increasing favor and interest in IntelliJ IDEA may eventually equalize things. Alternative JVM languages – Scala is the most interesting, enterprise-ready language on the JVM, and Groovy & Clojure play a great counterpart to the non-Java coding movement. Build tools – Maven’s dominance is now unquestioned with Ant’s decline from previous years, although fast-growing Gradle is extremely interesting to respondents. Application servers – Open-source players like Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty and GlassFish dominate both production and development environments, which use the same technology for 81% of respondents, although it’s clear that development-only app servers in the highest favor are Jetty, Tomcat & TomEE. Web frameworks – A mature and fragmented market, over 1/3 of developers use more than 1 web framework, and here Spring MVC is still king in this area, with stable JSF and growing Vaadin following Object-relational mapping frameworks – When it comes to ORM, Hibernate takes the cake, although other technologies are available and in common use in parallel. Code analysis tools – Although nearly 1/3 of developers don’t use these tools (big mistake), the market is rich with complementary technologies like FindBugs, CheckStyle and a platform to bring it all together, SonarQube. Continuous Integration (CI) servers – Jenkins’ dominance here is stronger than ever, yet 1 in 5 developers still don’t use CI as a practice. Databases: SQL and NoSQL – The mature SQL is dominated by Oracle, but the market has a good mix of free/open-source and proprietary offerings from long-time players. NoSQL is a maturing segment that is mainly driven by MongoDB. Version Control Systems (VCS) – Git, supported by the headline-worthy GitHub, is finally reigning supreme over Mercurial as a distributed VCS, and is often used in parallel with the legacy Subversion (SVN). Repositories – A maturing market that still needs a lot of adoption by developers, the legacy market leader Nexus is losing ground to JFrog’s Artifactory. Testing frameworks – In this area, complementary technologies work better together rather than competing, with unit testing, mocking and browser testing all highly practiced using strong tools like JUnit, Mockito and Selenium respectively. Priorities for 2015 – Java 8 (obviously), Continous Delivery / Deployment and Non-Java programming using alternative JVM languages are the 3 top priorities for the next year according to respondents.