Java 17, a Long-Term Support (LTS) version released in 2021, has finally surpassed Java 11 as the most used version of Java in production.
This is according to New Relic’s annual State of the Java Ecosystem report, which documents recent trends in the Java community based on monitoring the Java applications connected to its platform.
According to New Relic, the adoption of Java 17 has been faster than expected. In 2023, 9% of applications in production monitored by New Relic were using Java 17; Now, over 35% are using it.
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The company also found that these days newer versions of Java are being adopted much faster than they once were. For instance, six months after Java 21, 1.4% of applications were using it, compared to only .37% using Java 17 six months after its release.
Compared to other LTS releases, 33% are using Java 11, 29% are using Java 8, and 1.4% are using Java 21. The usage of Java 11 has sharply declined in the last year. In 2023, it was in use in 56% of applications, compared to roughly half that now.
The report also studied the makeup of the JDK market, which has gone through substantial changes since 2020 when Oracle was the most popular vendor at 75% market share. Oracle’s share of the JDK market has been steadily declining since, and now it only makes up 21% of the JDK market. Amazon also dropped to 18% this year, following an increase the previous year.
Eclipse Adoption is one of the JDK vendors that is on the rise at the moment, rising 50% in usage from last year (12% to 18%). According to New Relic, Eclipse Adoptium gets more frequent updates than the Oracle and Amazon ones.
Other findings from the report include:
- Log4j remains the most popular logging framework
- Bouncy Castle is the most popular encryption library for Java applications
- Oracle Database is the most popular database
