Author: Karsten Silz
Sep 7, 2022 | updated Sep 27, 2022 7 min read

Permalink: https://betterprojectsfaster.com/guide/java-full-stack-report-2022-09/be/

Java Full-Stack Index Q3/2022: Back-End Frameworks

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The content of this page is identical throughout Q3/2022 - July, August, and September.

Summary for Q3/2022

Popularity trend: Spring Boot remains the framework to beat and still grows in most categories. Despite a long decline, Jakarta EE leads Quarkus in all categories but questions at Stack Overflow, where Quarkus hits its all-time high. Quarkus also placed number three in job ad mentions after DropWizard’s collapse.
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.


2022	Aug	Jul	Jun	May	Apr	Mar	Feb	Jan
2021	Dec	Nov

Choices

Here are the choices in alphabetical order:

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 representing 89% of the worldwide GDP in 2020. It demonstrates the willingness of organizations to pay for a technology - the strongest indicator of popularity in my mind. Jakarta EE is the baseline.

Job ad mentions at Indeed for Jakarta EE and Spring Boot

And here are the remaining frameworks compared against Jakarta EE. They don’t all fit into the same chart. Helidon and MicroProfile are missing because they are at or below 1%, compared to Jakarta EE.

Job ad mentions at Indeed for Dropwizard, Jakarta EE, Micronaut, and Quarkus

Spring Boot wins, and Jakarta EE is second. Jakarta EE is losing ground against Spring Boot again. Dropwizard, Quarkus, and Micronaut are an order of magnitude behind Jakarta EE. Quarkus is back as number three, as Dropwizard mentions dropped like a stone in one month (couldn’t resist that pun): From 1,175 to 259 in one month, which is a loss of 78%.

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

Job Ad Caveats

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

Download Job Ad Mentions

Developers

Courses Bought at Udemy

Udemy is one of the biggest online learning sites. They publish the number of courses and students (beyond a certain threshold). 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 at Udemy for Jakarta EE, Spring, and Spring Boot

Spring Boot wins over Jakarta EE and is increasing its lead. But Jakarta EE had a strong month, forcing the slowest growth of Spring Boot since last November.

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

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:

All-Time Google Trends for Dropwizard, Jakarta EE, Micronaut, Spring Boot, and Quarkus

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’s decline in popularity to 2% of its June 2004 popularity is just stunning. Spring Boot just hit its all-time high (a repeat of its July 2019 score). It’s 17 times as popular as Jakarta EE and 35 times as popular as Quarkus.

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

Google Trends for Dropwizard, Helidon, Micronaut, MicroProfile, and Quarkus for the Last 2 Years

This is the link for the chart.

Quarkus leads. Quarkus added 40% over the last two years while MicroProfile stayed flat. Micronaut and Helidon lost a quarter of their search volume, DropWizard lost two thirds.

How does Jakarta EE fare against Quarkus?

Google Trends for Dropwizard, Helidon, Jakarta EE, Micronaut, and Quarkus for the Last 2 Years

Here’s the link for this chart.

Jakarta EE lost 28% of its search volume, and Quarkus is inching closer.

Questions at Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow Trends shows which percentage of questions at Stack Overflow has a particular technology tag. It is a proxy for using a technology during evaluation and productive use. “More questions = better” to me.

This link produces the chart above.

Spring Boot wins by an order of magnitude, while Quarkus places second and Jakarta EE third. Spring Boot is nearing its mid-2020 peak again. Quarkus grows slowly but just reached its peak value. Jakarta EE hit rock bottom in 2022 and is increasing again. DropWizard, Helidon, Micronaut, and MicroProfile don’t have a tag on Stack Overflow.

Analysis

Spring Boot dominates the Java ecosystem. So has the broadest support of libraries and third-party software working out of the box, conveniently configured the same way as Spring Boot. Its biggest weakness is the lackluster support for creating native executables: The resulting applications use more memory and start up slower than, say, Quarkus applications, and not all of the Spring Initializer libraries work natively. We’ll have to wait for Spring Boot 3 in late 2022 at the earliest to get really competitive memory usage and start-up times. And even then, some of the Spring Initializer still June not work natively.
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.*. So even though Jakarta EE saw three releases since 2019, I think relatively little functionality has changed since Java EE 8 in August 2017. 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, all by themselves as microservices in small containers or even serverless. This world has no place for application servers anymore. Will it have one 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 up 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, except for Job ads where it trails Dropwizard.
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.