Would you believe that 18% 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.
As for 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It shouldn’t be a surprise that so many systems are running out-of-date versions of Java. I’ve run into shops that still have old versions of NetWare, and are running quite out-of-date versions of Windows Server, DB2, Oracle—you name it.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 so, 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 up 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? Write me at feedback@bzmedia.com.
Alan Zeichick is editorial director of SD Times. Read his blog at ztrek.blogspot.com.
