RebelLabs survey findings: Java developers want to use professionally-supported technologies

Boston - May 16, 2014 - For the last 4 years, ZeroTurnaround's content gurus (who created RebelLabs in early 2013) have produced an annual report that tries to learn more about Java tools, technologies, productivity and methodologies. Next week, RebelLabs is releasing their 5th Java Tools & Technologies report, and we wanted to give you a heads up so you can clear your calendar (that unwatched episode of Game of Thrones can surely wait, right?) for the official launch next Tuesday, May 20th. But we thought it'd be fun to give you a sneak peak into what’s to come, including a great infographic and the official press release (also see below) that we sent out across the wire so that even local newspapers in rural Idaho can find out what's up...  

The official Press Release

ZeroTurnaround is preparing to release its annual statistical report on Java development tools & technologies. This year’s Java Tools and Technology survey was lead by Oliver White, Head of RebelLabs, and collected data from 2164 engineers, of which roughly two-thirds were Java/JVM software developers. “This year’s sample population was double what we had in 2013, and I’d love to get 10,000 engineers or more to do next year’s survey. The strong response was partially because we decided to give 50 cents to a charity called Child’s Play for each completed survey. This really had a great effect,” commented White. For 2014, RebelLabs covers more than a dozen different tool/technology segments within the Java industry in general, gathering the market share, usage and developer sentiment on different developer tools—such as IDEs, Application Servers, Build Tools, Web Frameworks, DBs, Continuous Integration tools and more. In addition, respondents were asked which IDE, build tool and alternative JVM language they would rather use or learn more about, regardless of their current technology stack. A sample of the results showed that:

With IDEs, 41% of respondents said they would prefer IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate--the commercial version--over any other IDE (IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, from JetBrains, has 26% of the market).

With build tools, 58% of developers want to learn more about using Gradle compared to any other build tool (Gradle, supported by Gradleware, has 11% of the market).

Regarding alternative JVM languages, 47% of those surveyed said they would like to learn Scala, followed by Groovy (31%), Clojure (12%) and others. Scala and related tools, backed by Typesafe, hold only 2% of the programming market, according to TIOBE. 

White continued, “I think the message here is becoming more clear. That, given the chance, Java developers are more interested in tools and surrounding services from professional organizations, regardless of whether the tool is open source or commercial.” By providing these survey results to the global Java community at large, RebelLabs aims to help the industry have deeper insight into the advantages and disadvantages of tools and methodologies used by software engineers.

The full 35+ page report will be available the week of May 19th, and interested parties can visit the existing RebelLabs collection of over 25 technical publications (along with years worth of smaller articles and blog posts).