A global survey of 2,039 Java developers published today finds 63% reporting that dead and unused code adversely affects their team’s productivity, with 22% describing the impact of that technical debt as being severe.
Conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Azul, a provider of a distribution of OpenJDK, the survey also finds that more than half (56%) now deal with a Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE) involving Java on a daily or weekly basis. Worse yet, 30% are spending more than half their time investigating vulnerabilities that turn out to be false positives.
Despite these issues, however, nearly every respondent (99%) is using Java, with 64% reporting that more than half of their applications or workloads are built with Java or run on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). A total of 62% work for organizations that now use Java to code artificial intelligence (AI) functionality, with 31% reporting that more than half of the Java applications they build now have AI functions.
The top capabilities developers said will be important for Java to remain competitive in an AI-enabled development landscape include long-term support for modern Java versions (35%), built-in security features (34%), observability insights (32%), support for large data access (30%), and integration with large language models (30%), the survey finds.
Simon Ritter, deputy CTO for Azul, said the survey makes it clear that developers are still committed to Java even in the age of AI. Application developers, despite any ongoing issues and concerns, remain committed to Java, he added.
The survey, however, also makes it clear that there is still a significant amount of dissension in the Java community following Oracle’s implementation of an employee-based pricing plan. A total of 92% report being concerned about the employee-based pricing that Oracle has adopted, with 81% have migrated, are migrating, or plan to migrate at least part of their Oracle Java to a non-Oracle OpenJDK distribution, with 63% intend to migrate their entire Java estate. Only 18% have completed that migration.
Cost remains the number one driver (37%) for migrating away from Oracle, followed by a preference for open source (31%), uncertainty created by ongoing changes (29%) and Oracle Java audit risk (26%). A total of 21% have already been subjected to an Oracle Java audit.
Overall, the survey finds 81% of respondents are running Java 17 or a later version of the venerable programming language. There are, of course, myriad challenges, including 74% percent that report they have more than 20% unused compute capacity in their public cloud environments. A full 97% have taken actions to reduce their public cloud costs, including adopting a high-performance Java platform (41%).
Of course, Java developers are embracing AI coding tools as quickly as any other developer. It’s not likely that 100% of Java code will be written using AI coding tools, but the pace at which Java applications are being built and deployed will only continue to accelerate. The only thing that remains to be seen is to what degree that new code might add or subtract from the amount of technical debt that many organizations are clearly finding it challenging to manage and secure.