Java Full-Stack Index Q4/2022: Back-End Frameworks

The content of this page is identical throughout Q4/2022 - October, November, and December.

Summary for Q4/2022

• Popularity trend: Spring Boot dominates and still grows in all categories except for Google searches. Despite a long decline, Jakarta EE leads Quarkus in all categories but questions at Stack Overflow, where Quarkus just hit its all-time high. Quarkus is now #3 in job ad mentions, Micronaut is the new #4.
• 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

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

Table Of Contents

• Summary for Q4/2022
• 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 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. Please note that the chart is not proportional so that all languages fit nicely.

Spring Boot wins, Jakarta EE is second, Quarkus third, and Micronaut fourth. After declining to its lowest value in January, Spring Boot rose again from a 4.4:1 lead over Jakarta EE to a 6.8:1 lead. Meanwhile Dropwizard went on a rollercoaster ride from #3 to #5, dropping from 13% of Jakarta EE’s mentions to just 2% last month. Quarkus is now the #3, doubling its absolute number and going from 9% to 15% against Jakarta EE. Micronaut more than doubled its absolute number and is #4 with 10%, double what it has been a year ago. Helidon and MicroProfile both 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. 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:

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 is trending down from its all-time high in March this year. Quarkus is at an all-time high with a score of two, tying Jakarta EE.

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

This is the link for the chart.

Quarkus leads. Quarkus tripled over the last three years while Helido and MicroProfile stayed flat. Micronaut grew by half while DropWizard lost a half.

How does Jakarta EE fare against Quarkus over the last three years?

Here’s the link for this chart.

Before Google changed how it counts values in 2022, Jakarta EE was down by 50%. Now it’s down by 25%. Quarkus had doubled by the end of 2021 and now has tripled.

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. After reaching a new all-time high a couple of months ago, Spring Boot is down again. After rising slowly for three years, Quarkus stagnates this year, sitting slightly below its peak value from early 2022. Jakarta EE ha hovered barely above zero for the last 2.5 years. DropWizard, Helidon, Micronaut, and MicroProfile don’t have a tag in Stack Overflow Trends.

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.