Java Tech Popularity Index Q2/2023: Back-End Frameworks

Summary for Q2/2023

Here is the scorecard of Jakarta EE (100%), not on the card, vs. Spring Boot (left) and Quarkus (right). The arrows show the trend vs. Jakarta EE.

Spring Boot pulls away from Jakarta EE everywhere except for job ad mentions, which have dropped by 21% since June 2022. Quarkus gains on Jakarta EE everywhere and pulls away in Stack Overflow questions.

Here are my recommendations:

• On your current project, keep your existing back-end framework unless that framework is absolutely, really not working out for you.
• If you need to switch back-end frameworks or are on a new project:
  • Use Quarkus if you need the smallest possible, fastest-starting Java application now.
  • Otherwise, use Spring Boot.

Archive

Table Of Contents

• Summary for Q2/2023
• Archive
• Choices
• Popularity
  • Why Popularity - and How?
  • Employers: Job Ads
  • Developers
    • Courses Bought at Udemy
    • Google Searches
    • Questions at Stack Overflow
• Analysis

Choices

Here are the choices in alphabetical order:

• Dropwizard
• Oracle’s Helidon
• Eclipse Jakarta EE (was Java EE before)
• Micronaut
• Eclipse MicroProfile
• VMWare’s Spring Boot
• Red Hat’s Quarkus

Popularity

Why Popularity - and How?

Picking a popular technology makes our developer life easier: Easier to learn, easier to build, debug & deploy, easier to find jobs/hire, and easier to convince teammates & bosses. Now popularity can make a difference in two situations: When multiple technologies score similarly, we could go for the most popular one. And when a technology is very unpopular, we may not use it.

I measure popularity among employers and developers as the trend between competing technologies. I count mentions in job ads at Indeed for employer popularity. For developer popularity, I use Google searches, Udemy course buyers, and Stack Overflow questions.

Employers: Job Ads

The Indeed job search is active in 62 countries. I picked 59 countries representing 69% of the worldwide GDP in 2022, excluding three countries because English word searches proved ineffective there: China, Japan, and South Korea. Job searches demonstrate the willingness of organizations to pay for a technology - the strongest indicator of popularity in my mind. Jakarta EE is the baseline. The chart is not proportional, so all frameworks fit nicely.

Spring Boot wins, Jakarta EE is second, Quarkus third, and Micronaut fourth. The number of developer ads is down in Q1/2023. Spring Boot has declined for nine months, dropping 21% to a 4.6:1 lead over Jakarta EE. Jakarta EE won 2023 so far — it gained on all other frameworks. The new kids, Quarkus and Micronaut, are the winners at #3 and #4, respectively, moving in lockstep. But both dropped significantly in the last two months — time will tell if this decline is here to stay. After a rollercoaster ride, Dropwizard went from #3 to #5 at just 29% of its starting share. Helidon and MicroProfile are insignificant in the job market.

Please see here for details, caveats, and adjustments to the job ad mentions.

You can find the detailed search results with links here. They include breakdowns by continents:

Developers

Courses Bought at Udemy

Udemy is one of the biggest online learning sites. They publish the number of people who bought a course (beyond a certain threshold, possibly around 100k). This shows how many people evaluate a technology. Jakarta EE is the baseline. The other frameworks haven’t crossed the reporting threshold for Udemy (probably around 100,000 students).

Spring Boot wins over Jakarta EE and is increasing its lead. In the last 15 months, only 19k students bought their first Jakarta EE course – but eleven times as many (210k) bought their first Spring Boot course. The Spring Framework also grows strongly.

Here are the links that show the courses for all and the number of students for some:

• Dropwizard
• Helidon
• Jakarta EE
• Micronaut
• MicroProfile
• Spring Boot
• Quarkus

Google Searches

Google Trends demonstrates the initial interest in a technology over time. Here are all frameworks, but Helidon - Google Trends only allows five at the same time:

Google changed its measurement algorithms on January 1, 2016, and January 1, 2022. That caused spikes for all values, especially in 2022.

This link produces the chart above. This version switches in Helidon for Micronaut and this one MicroProfile — which isn’t making a difference in the chart.

Spring Boot wins, and Jakarta EE is second. Jakarta EE lost 98% since 2004, equaling Quarkus at two today. Spring Boot stabilized in the last few months and just hit its all-time high again, leading both Quarkus and Jakarta EE nearly 20:1. DropWizard, Micronaut, and Helidon do not matter here.

We can’t pick a third place in the chart, so let’s zoom in on the five challengers over the last three years (chart link):

Quarkus leads the new frameworks. Quarkus tripled in two years but then stagnated in the last year. Helidon and Micronaut grew slightly. MicroProfile and DropWizard stayed flat.

How does Jakarta EE fare against Quarkus over the last three years (chart link)?

Jakarta EE beats Quarkus narrowly. Quarkus is neck-to-neck with Jakarta EE, but Jakarta EE currently leads and has done so all but two months.

Questions at Stack Overflow

We can run database queries against the questions, answers, and comments at Stack Overflow with the StackExchange Data Explorer. The number of questions is a proxy for using a technology during evaluation and productive use. “More questions = better” to me.

I used two queries to get the number of monthly questions below because putting all in one query timed out. You can run them in the StackExchange Data Explorer.

DECLARE @StartDate DATE = '2009-01-01';
DECLARE @EndDate DATE = '2023-03-31';

WITH TaggedQuestions AS (
  SELECT
    Id,
    CreationDate,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<spring>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS SpringTag,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<spring-boot>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS SpringBootTag,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<jakarta-ee>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS JakartaEETag
  FROM Posts
  WHERE
    PostTypeId = 1 AND -- 1 for questions
    CreationDate >= @StartDate AND
    CreationDate <= @EndDate
),
MonthlyCounts AS (
  SELECT
    DATEADD(month, DATEDIFF(month, 0, CreationDate), 0) AS Month,
    SUM(SpringTag) AS Spring,
    SUM(SpringBootTag) AS SpringBoot,
    SUM(JakartaEETag) AS JakartaEE
  FROM TaggedQuestions
  GROUP BY DATEADD(month, DATEDIFF(month, 0, CreationDate), 0)
)
SELECT
  Month,
  Spring,
  SpringBoot,
  JakartaEE
FROM MonthlyCounts
ORDER BY Month;

DECLARE @StartDate DATE = '2009-01-01';
DECLARE @EndDate DATE = '2023-03-31';

WITH TaggedQuestions AS (
  SELECT
    Id,
    CreationDate,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<quarkus>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS QuarkusTag,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<micronaut>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS MicronautTag,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<helidon>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS HelidonTag,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<dropwizard>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS DropWizardTag
  FROM Posts
  WHERE
    PostTypeId = 1 AND -- 1 for questions
    CreationDate >= @StartDate AND
    CreationDate <= @EndDate
),
MonthlyCounts AS (
  SELECT
    DATEADD(month, DATEDIFF(month, 0, CreationDate), 0) AS Month,
    SUM(QuarkusTag) AS Quarkus,
    SUM(MicronautTag) AS Micronaut,
    SUM(HelidonTag) AS Helidon,
    SUM(DropWizardTag) AS DropWizard
  FROM TaggedQuestions
  GROUP BY DATEADD(month, DATEDIFF(month, 0, CreationDate), 0)
)
SELECT
  Month,
  Quarkus,
  Micronaut,
  Helidon,
  DropWizard
FROM MonthlyCounts
ORDER BY Month;

Spring Boot wins by an order of magnitude, while Quarkus places second and Jakarta EE third. After losing 40% of its 2020 question volume in the following two years, Spring Boot made up half that loss since early 2022. After rising slowly for three years, Quarkus stagnated last year and sits at 5% of Spring Boot’s volume. With 486 questions as its all-time high in 2013, Jakarta EE is now down to a relatively low 22 questions in March 2023. Even Micronaut has more at 35. DropWizard shrunk from a low high of 51 questions in 2015 to just four last month, while Helidon never got more than 10.

Analysis

• Spring Boot dominates the Java ecosystem. It has the broadest support of libraries and third-party software working out of the box, conveniently configured consistently with Spring Boot. Spring Boot 3 now has built-in support to create native Java executables with the GraalVM Native Image AOT compiler. You know, just like Quarkus, Micronaut, and Helidon have done for years. But with a multi-year head-start, these Spring Boot competitors probably produce smaller and faster native Java executables. If that matters to you, then go Quarkus or Micronaut. If the loss of 21% of its job ad mentions vs. Jakarta EE widens in the next index update, then Spring users have something to worry about indeed.
• Jakarta EE is a vendor-independent specification with multiple implementations. It has had a rough couple of years: First, Oracle neglected it when it was still called “Java EE”. Oracle grudgingly transferred it to the Eclipse Foundation but required renaming all packages from javax.* to jakarta.*. After Java EE 8 in August 2017, we had to wait five years for new features in Jakarta EE 10. But the more significant issue is that Jakarta EE was designed for application servers like IBM WebSphere that host many applications on big and expensive servers. We’re rapidly moving into a world where our Java applications run as close to the metal as possible, as microservices in small containers or even serverless. Will that world still have a place for Jakarta EE? Only time will tell.
• MicroProfile is “Spring Boot with more Jakarta EE parts”, but without its broad support of libraries and third-party software. It started out of frustration with the slow progress of Java EE in 2016. Just like Jakarta EE, it is a vendor-independent specification with multiple implementations. It’s probably the least popular framework here, based on my measurements.
• Dropwizard is a framework that I had never heard of until the “JRebel 2021 Java Technology Report” declared it the #2 Java framework. Its origins seem to go back to 2012. It has the most job ad mentions besides Spring Boot and Jakarta EE.
• Quarkus is Red Hat’s take on a cloud-native Java framework. “Cloud-native” means producing small and fast applications: Quarkus claims 12 MB RAM for a REST application that starts in 0.016 seconds. It has the most mind-share as the cloud-native Spring Boot competitor. It’s the most popular framework besides Spring Boot and Jakarta EE.
• Micronaut is the second cloud-native Spring Boot competitor. It’s backed by consulting company Object Computing, which sponsors Grails and is less popular than Quarkus.
• Helidon is the third and least popular cloud-native Spring Boot competitor. It’s an Oracle framework.

So here’s my recommendation:

• On your current project, keep your existing back-end framework unless that framework is absolutely, really not working out for you.
• If you need to switch back-end frameworks or are on a new project:
  • Use Quarkus if you need the smallest possible, fastest-starting Java application now.
  • Otherwise, use Spring Boot 3.