Tomcat, Eclipse named the most popular in SDTimes study
April 1, 2008 —
What’s the most popular Java application server? Tomcat. What’s the most popular integrated development environment for writing Java applications? Eclipse.
Those are among the findings of a recent study by BZ Research, like SD Times a division of BZ Media. The seventh annual Java Awareness Study, completed in December, showed very little change year-on-year for enterprise Java developers.
When it comes to application servers, the top six remain in the same order, with only slight variations in the percentage of enterprises using them. The top app server in the 2007 survey was Apache Tomcat, at 60.7% of respondents using it; followed by IBM WebSphere, at 36.5%; JBoss Application Server, 30.4%; Oracle, 25.6%; BEA WebLogic, 25.1%; and Sun Java Enterprise System, at 20.7%.
The story is slightly different when it comes to IDEs. The top two Java IDEs remained unchanged from 2006, with Eclipse staying firmly in the lead at 62.7%, followed by NetBeans, at 24.4%. The next two spots, however, switched places: 2006’s fourth-place IDE, Oracle’s JDeveloper, advanced to 20.4% usage, passing last year’s third-place IBM Rational Application Developer, which fell slightly to 19.4%. The results for NetBeans, Oracle and IBM are within the 2.5% margin of error for this study, making it a statistical three-way tie.
Enterprises overwhelmingly deploy their Java applications on servers. Fully 74.1% of respondents said that they will do so within a year. However, the client isn’t forgotten, as 51.8% say they’ll push apps out to desktops and notebooks. Smaller numbers say they will deploy Java apps on wireless/mobile clients (17.8%) and within embedded systems (10.1%).
The push out to the server isn’t surprising, given that 49.1% of respondents said that they are integrating Java EE or Java SE applications with Web applications. That compares with 27.9% who said that they are integrating their Java apps with non-Java Linux and Unix apps, and 24.2% said they were integrating Java and Windows apps.
Also popular integration targets: SOA, at 27.0%; e-commerce and e-business systems, 25.5%; midrange/mainframe applications, 23.8%; CRM and ERP systems, 21.5%; and externally hosted and Software as a Service apps, 12.8%.
BZ Research’s seventh annual Java Awareness Study was completed by 790 enterprise software development managers. The next study is scheduled to be conducted in December.
Related Search Term(s): Eclipse, IBM, Java, Oracle, Sun, Tomcat
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