Java, Java everywhere - Alan Zeichick

Would you believe that 18.0% of developers that SD Times surveyed said that their organizations are running J2EE 1.4 in production environments? That’s the version of the Java server-side platform that was officially released in November 2003. That shows the persistence of deployed platforms. If it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade it.

What about new versions? 44.8% said that they are running Java EE 5 (which came out in May 2006), and 54.3% have some servers running Java EE 6 (which was released in December 2009).

It shouldn’t be a surprise that so many systems are running out of date versions of Java. I’ve run into shops that still have old version of Netware, and are running quite out-of-date versions of Windows Server, DB2, Oracle – you name it. Given the costs and risks of upgrading, unless there’s a clear reason to do, developers and IT administrators are going to be conservative. Can’t blame them.

Those numbers are from brand-new research conducted by SD Times – our Java & SOA Study, completed in December 2011.

I’ll share another data point: the most popular Java IDEs in use in the developer’s organization. These add to more than 100% because some organizations run multiple IDEs:

Eclipse JDT: 65.3%

Oracle NetBeans: 25.8%

Oracle JDeveloper: 16.9%

IBM WSAD: 13.2%

IBM RAD: 12.4%

Apple Xcode: 10.8%

JetBrains IntelliJ: 9.9%

Genuitec MyEclipse 9.4%

The rest all scored below 9% utilization. Interestingly 14.3% of respondents said that vi and vim are used with Java, and 9.3% said that their organization uses emacs.

Is your organization using obsolescent versions of server platforms? Leave a comment.