The JVM Ecosystem Survey Report was sponsored by Snyk and Oracle, and asked members of Java User Groups around the world a sequence of questions about their use of Java. Among the questions the survey set out to answer was:

• Is Maven still the dominating build tool on the JVM or has Gradle made ground?
• Does IntelliJ IDEA really have a lead over the Eclipse IDE and if so, by how much?
• Has Java EE been able to slow down its rate of loss of adoption?
• How much does Spring now dominate the Web Framework world?
• What has the recent Java SE version adoption been like?
• How often will people choose to upgrade their Java versions?

In terms of Java versions being used, the findings showed that 79 percent of developers are using Java 8, 9 percent are using Java 7 and 3 percent are using Java 6 or below. For more modern versions, 4 percent of developers reported using Java 9, 4 percent Java 10, and zero percent had moved to 11 EA.

When asked how the developers decided when to move to a new version, 30 percent decide on a release by release basis, while 34 percent stay with Long Term Support (LTS) releases such as Java 9. Others didn't know, and only 8 percent said they choose to always keep up with the latest version.

Asked which IDE they use, IntelliJ came out top at 45 percent, followed by Eclipse at 38 percent. Apache NetBeans held its share at around 10 percent of the market. Other points of note are that Visual Studio Code showed up at 1 percent,  and as the survey reported:

"Also, a tip of the hat to the ‘vi/vim/emacs/etc’ group who are probably reading this report on a tablet (carved out of stone)"

Three percent of developers gave vi etc as an answer.

In terms of which JDK implementation developers use in production, most (70 percent) are using Oracle JDK, while OpenJDK came in next at 21 percent. Others included Eclipse OpenJ9/IBM J9 at four percent, and Android SDK at two percent. The report authors pointed out that::

"However, future licensing and support changes might cause these numbers to change in the future."

Maven continues to be the most popular build tool, with 60 percent of respondents using it. Gradle was the next most popular at 19 percent.

Only 57 percent of developers are using cloud platforms. Of those, most (63 percent) used Amazon AWS, followed by Google Cloud at 20 percent,, Azure at 18 percent, with Red Hat OpenShift at 10 percent, and Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Pivotal Cloud and Cloud Foundry all having smaller shares.

For more results from the survey see JVM Ecosystem Report Reveals the State of Java.