Java Tech Popularity Index Q2/2023: Web Frameworks

Summary for Q2/2023

Here is the scorecard of Angular (100%), not on the card, vs. React (left) and Vue (right). The arrows show the trend vs. Angular.

React pulls away from Angular except for jobs where Angular surprisingly got closer in the last year. Vue holds steady or gains slightly against Angular.

Here are my recommendations:

• If you already use React, Angular, or Vue in your project, keep using them. Otherwise, evaluate a migration. In many (most?) cases, such migration doesn’t make business sense.
• If you start a new project or migrate, start with React first, Angular otherwise, and finally, Vue.

Archive

Table Of Contents

• Summary for Q2/2023
• Archive
• Applications
• Choices
• State of the Art
• Popularity
  • Why Popularity - and How?
  • Employers: Job Ads
  • Developers
    • Students at Udemy
    • Google Searches
    • Questions at Stack Overflow
• Analysis

Applications

These recommendations are for building web enterprise applications on PCs and mobile devices — forms, data grids, and reports. They are not for games or media applications.

Choices

• Google’s Angular
• Jakarta Server Faces (was JavaServer Faces)
• Facebook’s React
• Thymeleaf
• Vaadin
• Vue (“Vue.js” is the correct but longer name)

State of the Art

Declarative UIs are state-of-the-art. Learn about it here.

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. Angular is the baseline.

React wins, Angular is second, and Vue is third. The number of developer ads is down in Q1/2023. After bumping up and down, React and Vue are slightly below their August 2021 levels, while JSF is steady. React leads Angular by 14%, Vue trails it by 70%, and JSF has just 4% of Angular’s mentions. With 0.3% and 0.5%, respectively, Thymeleaf and Vaadin are missing from the chart.

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

Students 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. Angular is the baseline. The other frameworks don’t cross the reporting threshold for Students at Udemy (possibly around 100,000 students).

React wins, Angular is second, and Vue is third. React steadily pulls away from Angular, leading 1.5:1 now. Vue catches up very slowly, gaining just 1% over the last year.

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

• Angular
• JSF
• React
• Thymeleaf
• Vaadin
• Vue

Google Searches

Google Trends demonstrates the initial interest in a technology over time. Thymeleaf is missing from the list because Google only allows five search terms. “More searches = better” to me.

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. Here’s a version with Thymeleaf instead of Vaadin: Thymeleaf also flat-lines.

React wins, Angular is second, and Vue is third. React is 6% off its all-time high from February and leads Angular 2.5:1. Angular lost a quarter of its July 2019 peak. Vue is 18% off its April 2022 peak and has half of Angular’s volume. All other frameworks are insignificant against these three.

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('<reactjs>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS ReactTag,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<angular>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS AngularTag,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<vue.js>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS VueTag
  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(ReactTag) AS React,
    SUM(AngularTag) AS Angular,
    SUM(VueTag) AS Vue
  FROM TaggedQuestions
  GROUP BY DATEADD(month, DATEDIFF(month, 0, CreationDate), 0)
)
SELECT
  Month,
  React,
  Angular,
  Vue
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('<thymeleaf>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS ThymeleafTag,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<jsf>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS JSFTag,
    CASE WHEN CHARINDEX('<vaadin>', Tags) > 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS VaadinTag
  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(ThymeleafTag) AS Thymeleaf,
    SUM(JSFTag) AS JSF,
    SUM(VaadinTag) AS Vaadin
  FROM TaggedQuestions
  GROUP BY DATEADD(month, DATEDIFF(month, 0, CreationDate), 0)
)
SELECT
  Month,
  Thymeleaf,
  JSF,
  Vaadin
FROM MonthlyCounts
ORDER BY Month;

React wins, Angular is second, and Vue is third. React has grown spectacularly from 2015 to 2020 but peaked in May 2022. It still leads Angular 3.3:1. Angular continues its 5-year decline and has lost 62% of its questions since May 2018. Vue has declined for 2 years but still has gained on Angular, reaching 50% of its question volume. JSF, Vaadin, and Thymeleaf barely register against the “Big Three”.

Analysis

I use the following criteria to recommend one of the three choices - Angular, React, and Vue:

• Java: Angular wins here because it uses Typescript by default. Typescript is closer to Java than plain JavaScript.
• Declarative: Declarative is state-of-the-art for front-end development. Please see my guide for it. React uses it by default. Angular does not, so React wins.
• Safe: Google has the image of killing projects and has multiple competing front-end frameworks. That’s why I’m more confident that React will still be around in five years.
• Popular: As you can see above, React is the most popular framework.
• Web functionality: It’s a draw, as all three frameworks can build the applications we need.
• Libraries: I don’t know which of these three frameworks has the most and best libraries. I think many libraries work in all three.
• Speed: I think you can build the fastest applications with React because it has features to speed up the concurrent loading of components.
• Build, Deploy & Debug: I don’t know which frameworks have the shortest build & deploy cycle and the best debug experience.

Based on these criteria and my ratings, React is the winner, Angular second, and Vue third. My recommendation is this:

• If you already use React, Angular, or Vue in your project, keep using them.
• If you use another framework, investigate migration to React first, then Angular, and finally Vue. In many (most?) cases, such migration doesn’t make business sense.
• If you start a new project, start with React first, Angular otherwise, and finally, Vue.