Eclipse’s Jakarta EE gains momentum

Jakarta EE, the Eclipse Foundation’s implementation of enterprise Java, is gathering steam, with nearly half of respondents to a recent Eclipse survey indicating they have either migrated to Jakarta or were planning to do so within two years.

More than 48% of respondents already had moved to the platform, which is the successor to Java EE (Enterprise Edition), or planned to do so within six months to two years, Eclipse noted in its 2021 Jakarta EE Developer Survey Report, released September 13.

The report also indicated that business application development for the cloud has accelerated through Jakarta. The foundation said that since the release of Jakarta EE 9 in December 2020, Jakarta has emerged as the second-most-used cloud native framework, with 47% of respondents using it. Jakarta trailed only Spring/Spring Boot, used by 60% of respondents.

Eclipse took over stewardship of enterprise Java from Oracle in 2017. The name of the platform, Java EE, was then changed to Jakarta EE. Eclipse’s survey was intended to help Java ecosystem stakeholders better understand cloud native Java and the requirements, priorities, and perceptions of enterprise developer communities. The survey polled 940 individuals around the globe from April 6 to May 31.

Other findings of the 2021 Jakarta EE Developer Survey Report:

• Adoption of the Eclipse MicroProfile Java microservices architecture increased to 34% in 2021, versus 29% in 2020.
• The popularity of microservices has held steady with a nominal year-over-year increase, with the usage of the microservices architecture for implementing Java systems in the cloud increasing to 43% in 2021, versus 39% in 2020.
• Priorities for the Jakarta EE community include faster innovation, better support for microservices, and native integration with Kubernetes.
• The three “most important” cloud native technologies were Docker, Kubernetes, and Jakarta EE, in that order.
• The top three architectural approaches for implementing Java systems in the cloud were microservices, hybrid, and monolith, in that order.

Participants in the survey identified themselves as being in roles ranging from senior or junior developer and architect to development manager. They worked in industries ranging from IT and software to education, financial services, and government.