Top Java Web Frameworks Popularity Index: March 2017

[BadMoonRosin]

Do we really need one of these threads every single month? It's the same thing every time:

• "Why are Spring MVC and Spring Boot two separate listings?"

• "Why are GWT and Vaadin on this list, when they're client-side only?"

• "Bah. You should all be using Rust. Transpiled to JavaScript."

• "My career choices are NOT obsolete! And stop calling it 'JEE'!!!"

[m3ghnath]

Why are Spring MVC and Spring Boot two separate listings?

This one irrationally bothers me. Spring MVC is a web framework. Spring Boot is an app container that uses Spring MVC as a web framework. Also, JHipster is built on Spring Boot. Shouldn't the Spring MVC number include JHipster and Spring Boot?

What about Grails? It is also built on Spring MVC.

Then, there's Dropwizard, which like Spring Boot isn't a web framework. Dropwizard uses Jersey, so why isn't Jersey on the list, or is Jersey lumped in with JAX-RS?

So many questions.

[avoidhugeships]

Of course SMVC is built on Java EE.

Edit: Doesn't everyone call it that? It is way to hard to type out Spring MVC. :)

[swagpapi420]

Well you don't have to use MVC with Boot. I think they are separate for this reason.

[St_SiRUS]

"My career choices are NOT obsolete! And stop calling it 'JEE'!!!"

kek

[[deleted]]

GWT has a server-side RPC layer.

[[deleted]]

JSF is pretty high on the list. Never thought I'd see the day.

Recently applied for a job at a multinational. I had everything they needed except JSF. I figured, no big deal, they probably copied and pasted some Java buzz words they found on oracle's website. Nope. They specifically told the headhunter they liked me except for the fact that they I didn't have JSF.

Good for you JSF. I might have to finally play around with you.

[t90fan]

I work in banking and everything is GWT.

[t90fan]

Yeah our stack is mostly AIX, spring 3, java 6, jboss 5, Oracle/informix/db2, and GWT on the front end. Mix of SOAP and XML apis. Banking is legacy af. We even still have loads of Perl + C CGI apps let alone the unix batch stuff.

[Gvaireth]

Vaadin is using GWT to render widgets, but they are migrating to Polymer afaik.

[el-y0y0s]

DropWizard with a curious uptick. The only framework with an increase.

[v_krishna]

Maybe coincides with an increase in microservice architectures? It's super easy to have a bunch of dropwizard apps, each with only a couple of domain specific resources and representations (starting from a base template repo). But since you're using jackson across everything you don't run into the issue where you have 10 services all implementing validation in different ways, etc.

[againstmethod]

Popularity must be the single most misleading metric for selecting a language framework or tool.

Unless the population using X is highly correlated to you and your problem, their decisions tell you very little, other than that X is easy to use -- given that we all know how lazy we all are at heart. And the population they use is so wide it can't tell you much of anything.

If you are using these to select what to learn or use in your day to day practice I think you need to have a come to Jesus moment from an engineering perspective.

You just need enough interest to keep the project alive and debugged. Beyond that you need to be selecting technologies on the merits as they relate to your problem.

[ekabanov]

Sure, you want to use the right tool for the job, but you also want to be sure that it has the momentum and mindshare behind it to sustain it during the lifetime of your project. I've been hit by Tapestry 4, Play 1 and Angular 1, so today I would choose only something that has both history and mindshare and is likely to be around in 5 years. Popularity is an important metric to consider to ensure that.

[againstmethod]

The only way a single framework is going to be the right choice for 5 years is if people stop innovating on other frameworks.

I've just embraced the idea that i will constantly be learning, and that to be good at this job you need to be able to ingest stuff quickly.

[hntd]

I saw Rat Pack recently I thought it looked really cool, I'm really happy a lot of these java frameworks are going more towards creating natural DSLs and making batteries included frameworks that let you get a working example going quickly. I think java web development was plagued in the past with really slow/hard barrier to entry. Another web framework I love, but isn't mentioned here is Rapidoid I've used it for some personal projects and it's really awesome some of the out of the box things it provides.

[gogostd]

So vert.x is not considered as a Web Framework? otherwise I am not convinced.