devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: Java applications

Survey: Java Developers Wrestling With Massive Amounts of Technical Debt

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.

February 10, 2026
Organizations Prioritizing Java Application Modernization

A survey found that modernizing existing Java applications is a higher priority than other projects for 87% of respondents, with more than 80% of these applications expected to be re-engineered over the next five years. The survey polled 450 IT professionals working in organizations in the U.S. and United Kingdom that have more than 500 employees.

Conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Diffblue, a provider of a generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform for refactoring applications and generating unit tests, the survey also found enterprises plan to invest nearly half (45%) of their software development resources on modernization of existing applications versus developing new ones. A full 90% of respondents expected to rely on automation to accomplish those tasks, the survey found.

Specifically, survey respondents reported they planned to rely on automation to improve security (50%), increase development velocity (45%) and improve developer experience (42%). Well over half of respondents (58%) said they had already been working on these projects for more than 12 months.

If organizations don’t modernize Java applications, more than half of respondents (51%) said too much time would be spent on unproductive coding, while 50% said development velocity would be adversely affected. The biggest obstacles cited are choosing the right technical approach (45%) and securing budget (42%).

More than half of organizations (59%) have created a dedicated modernization budget to support their efforts. Nealy half (48%) said funds are being provided by business teams for projects, while 49% said general operating budgets have increased.

Diffblue CEO Matthew Lodge said it’s clear there is a huge commitment to application modernization. The reality is the majority of work IT teams do involves applications that have already been deployed. The challenge they face is that the effort required to modernize these applications is still far too dependent on manual processes, he added.

Overall, the survey found 96% of respondents considered Java applications extremely or very important to their organizations. On average, 65% reported additional Java applications are still being developed. Only 4% said they planned to migrate away from Java as part of a modernization effort.

Over half of the respondents expected to use Java 11 (53%) or Java 17 (56%) in their applications, compared to 19% using Java 8. More than a quarter (27%) expected to use a forthcoming Java 21 release. A full 100% expected to use the Spring framework to build these applications, with more than half (54%) planning to upgrade to the latest version that supports Java 17. A full 97% said unit testing is an “extremely” or “very important” element of their application modernization effort.

After experiencing something akin to a mid-life crisis, Java has itself been modernized with the release of Java 17, noted Lodge. The Java community is now adopting many concepts that may have been pioneered in other programming languages, he added.

Regardless of whether organizations are modernizing existing Java applications or writing new ones, the one thing that appears certain is the venerable programming language isn’t about to disappear any time soon.

February 14, 2023
Microsoft Taps vFunction to Refactor Java Apps for Azure

Microsoft has teamed up with vFunction to make it easier to convert monolithic Java applications into a set of microservices that can be deployed on the Microsoft Azure cloud.

The Microsoft Services Industry Solutions group is making available the Java Refactoring Service, through which IT teams will be able to both lift and shift Java applications to the cloud and then convert them into a set of microservices using agent software and the vFunction Application Transformation Engine, which is infused with artificial intelligence (AI), to analyze Java code.

vFunction CEO Moti Rafalin said the goal is to eliminate the heavy lifting currently required to shift Java applications into the cloud. The vFunction Application Transformation Engine is required because most of the Java applications that were easy to move to the cloud have been, Rafalin noted. The remaining Java applications, he said, have levels of dependencies that make them too complex to move to the cloud without the aid of a static byte code analysis platform capable of parsing more than 10 million lines of code and thousands of Java class libraries.

Once those applications are converted into a set of microservices, it then becomes possible to achieve a level of scale that would otherwise be beyond the reach of any on-premises IT environment, he added, noting the same vFunction platform can be used also to help organizations continuously optimize microservices applications as they continue to evolve in a cloud computing environment.

Longer-term, vFunction is also looking to add support for Microsoft.Net applications that need to be migrated to the cloud, said Rafalin. Many complex Java and Microsoft.Net applications are still running in an on-premises IT environment because organizations are encountering inertia that arises from paralysis of analysis, he noted.

In general, Microsoft continues to gain momentum in its battle for cloud supremacy against Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s not clear at what rate Java applications are being shifted to the cloud. However, most monolithic applications have components that would be easier to maintain and support as a distinct microservice. In general, organizations are embracing microservices to build applications that are more resilient. In the event a microservice becomes unavailable, requests for services are rerouted to another microservice to make sure the application degrades gracefully, rather than simply crashing altogether. The challenge, of course, is that over time the dependencies that can exist between hundreds of microservices can be more challenging to manage than those of the monolithic application being replaced.

It’s not likely that microservices-based applications with entire replace monolithic applications anytime soon, but the bulk of new applications are being built on top of a microservices-based framework. As such, many DevOps teams are now managing a broad mix of monolithic and microservices-based applications across an increasingly complex IT environment. Less clear is to what degree teams will be able to leverage existing DevOps tools and platforms to build and deploy both types of applications at the scale enterprise IT organizations require.

April 18, 2022