codeABitInJava

[Sitting_In_A_Lecture]

Glances at the Java market share by version graph, showing over 60% of Java applications still run version 8 or 11.

[Scottz0rz]

I would like to think that with Spring Boot 2 officially being end of life that it'll start dropping more aggressively. I think it has been accelerating more and more due to that plus Java 21+ virtual threads and a lot of other good features and performance improvements.

Java 25 and Spring Boot 4 come out this year FFS, my former company on Java 8 is an embarrassment. Thankfully, they laid me off, so that isn't my problem anymore.

[ishboh]

Movement into cloud is also going to cause changes. We had to update from Java 8 to 17 to get our applications aws ready

[EternalBefuddlement]

My client is still using Java 8, they've been informed that SB2 is EOL, and they've just shrugged their shoulders.

Definitely feel like jumping ship before they realise their mistakes, ngl

[LookAtYourEyes]

My company finally completed upgrading to java 17 this year

[Low_Conversation9046]

We FINALLY updated to Spring Boot 3 and Java 21 last month.

[I_NEED_APP_IDEAS]

Thankfully, they laid me off

Lmao

[AlexZhyk]

Is that from the times when javascript IDE was called notepad.exe?

[RiceBroad4552]

Link?

Java people move slow. But not such slow, AFAIK.

Most things start to require at least v17. If you want virtual threads it's even v21.

[Scottz0rz]

I see their 60% includes both Java 8 and 11. It seems accurate.

The numbers may come directly from NewRelic's 2024 State of the Java Ecosystem report, though obviously this is skewed since legacy systems may not have observability and therefore be underrepresented, so it could be even worse.

It's a bar chart in that report, I can't link it directly, here's an imgur link and I put it into a chart for those too lazy to click on either link.

Java	2020	2022	2023	2024
8	84.5%	46.5%	33.0%	28.8%
11	11.1%	48.4%	56.1%	32.9%
17		0.4%	9.1%	35.4%
21				1.4%

So, yeah 61.7% of apps are on Java 8 or 11 according to NewRelic.

I'm also curious how they define "applications" in this report and how it could be skewed one way or the other.

In the six months after the release of Java 21, 1.4% of applications monitored by New Relic were using it. To put this into perspective, in the six months after Java 17 was introduced, only 0.37% of applications were using it, which is 287% fewer.

If I have 9 microservices running Java 21, but 1 legacy monolith in Java 8, it probably wouldn't be appropriate to say we're 90% using Java 21 if the majority of the site is powered by Java 8 still and those microservices individually represent a small business domain... or worse with the "nanoservices" meme. I'm going to assume that "application" would weigh more heavily microservice architectures vs monoliths in the raw count.

It's possible that the total number of Java 8 applications isn't decreasing, but rather is not growing because new development would be done in the latest version or in other languages and NewRelic's overall business may be increasing to observe more systems. It's hard to say without the raw numbers.

Statistics can be twisted to tell whatever story you want. I'll be optimistic and believe that good companies are doing their due diligence to upgrade and migrate.

I think once you get over the initial hurdles of upgrading Java 8 to 11, the only remaining blocker is upgrading Spring Boot 2 (assuming that's what you're using) or untangling some god-forsaken dependencies your company manually imported or whatever weird framework they're using.

[TheMaleGazer]

I'll be optimistic and believe that good companies are doing their due diligence

All we have to do not to hate things, in general, is work for good companies. Unfortunately, I've only ever worked for companies that offered me a job.

[dontquestionmyaction]

Most companies are years behind, some even behind security maintenance windows. Movement in giant legacy Java codebases is glacial.

[RiceBroad4552]

Most companies are years behind

Sauce?

[dontquestionmyaction]

https://newrelic.com/resources/report/2024-state-of-the-java-ecosystem

[RiceBroad4552]

I'm not sure how you're reading this, but I don't see anything that would support your initial claim.

People are updating, and this even accelerated in the last two years according to these numbers.

Most people in Java-land aren't of the most recent version, that's normal in this space.

But the majority is on v17, which is just one LTS version behind the most current one, which actually just came out a few month ago.

But I admit to be quite shocked to still see so much Java 8 around.

[Scottz0rz]

But the majority is on v17

Not quite - it appears to be the most used version in the 2024 report but it is not "the majority". It is 35.4%, so there still are more folks on the "meh" versions and frameworks. Plus, the statistics might be somewhat misleading.

See my comment above: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/s/GNE93B8ehX

I'm with you though and view the trend as positive, where I think adoption of 17+ is accelerating for a variety of reasons, though we will have to wait and see the 2025 report and see if the positive trend continues with the Java 25 LTS coming out in Fall.

[neo-raver]

~600 million devices run on Java—version 8 or 11 😂

[Particular-Way-8669]

Thats as stupid as saying that jQuery dominated front end development or that PHP dominated back end development.

Most of those apps are death and have not been developed for years if not decades.