SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwired) — 10/20/14 — Typesafe, provider of the world–s leading Reactive platform and the company behind Play Framework, Akka, and Scala, today released a new survey of Java developers on their plans to upgrade to the latest release of Java and which features of the release mattered most. The latest findings suggest that adoption of Java 8 is running ahead of predictions in the first Typesafe Java 8 adoption survey (March 2014), with two-thirds of those polled now saying they were running Java 8 or had committed to switching within a year. Java 8 “adopters” were aggressively embracing the new release while “holdouts” cited legacy architectures — not features of Java 8 — as the biggest obstacle to upgrading.
The survey, conducted in September 2014, garnered 3,030 responses. Participants were very hands-on with Java. 61% identified themselves as developers while 27% checked off as architect. 26% coded full-time while 55% spent more than half their work day coding.
“It–s truly remarkable how quickly the Java developer community has rallied around Java 8,” said Jonas Bonér, CTO and co-founder of Typesafe and creator of the Akka event-driven middleware project. “Innovation around Java and the JVM is transforming the modern data center infrastructure.”
Among the key findings of the survey were ():
Among Java 8 adopters, more than a fifth were already running the latest release in production with more than 35% running in staging environments and planning to shift to production shortly. Another 40% of adopters were running in pilot or testing environments.
Of Java 8 “holdouts,” 69% are running Java 7 and 26% are running Java 6. For the majority of Java holdouts, the main challenge to migrating to the latest release is their past. 37% cited “hurdles with legacy infrastructure” while 19% cited organizational obstacles. Only 19% called out specific concerns with Java 8.
Survey respondents overwhelmingly (80%) cited Lambda expressions and virtual extension models as the most important new Java 8 feature. Another 47% called out enhanced core libraries with Lambda as the second most important new feature. Other popular new features included date and time API (37%), bulk data operations for collections (37%) and concurrency updates (27%). 45% are using Lambda–s features in Java 8, 51% are “exploring” Lambdas and nearly half are either using functional programming (47%) or are exploring functional programming (49%).
Nearly 30% of respondents are already looking forward to Java 9 with “strong interest.” There are two major features that have emerged as being of particular interest: 48% of respondents said they were most excited about Value Types, while 43% said they are most interested in Project Jigsaw.
Other topics of interest to Java developers addressed in the report () include:
Oracle owns the JVM and SDK;
Traditional heavyweight J2EE servers WebSphere and WebLogic fading in favor of lightweight approaches like Tomcat;
Amazon is the most popular public cloud by far;
Nearly two-thirds of respondents are exploring containers but less than a quarter use Docker today;
More than half of respondents have a big data strategy or are exploring one for their organizations, and more than 17% of respondents are already using Apache Spark in production.
Download Typesafe Java 8 Adoption Survey Report ()
(Twitter: @Typesafe) is dedicated to helping developers build Reactive applications on the JVM. With the Typesafe Reactive Platform, you can create modern, event-driven applications that scale on multicore and cloud computing architectures. Typesafe Activator, a browser-based tool with reusable templates, makes it easy to get started with Play Framework, Akka and Scala. Backed by Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Juniper Networks, Typesafe is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Switzerland and Sweden. To start building Reactive applications today, download Typesafe Activator!
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