Continued growth in modern architectures by Spring developer community

Of these stakeholders, 93% stated they are using microservices, 25% using Reactive, and almost a quarter (24%) now using Serverless. This is supporting accelerated delivery of modern apps, which is reflected by the fact that native compilation also continued to trend in 2022.

Research showed all respondents (98%) who are aware of Spring Native are interested in compiling Spring apps. More than three-quarters (79%) intend to deploy compiled Spring applications within two years or less.

Three quarters (75%) stated they like using Spring because it is stable, scalable and secure. However, the report also found upgrades become a pain point in the Java community, as new major and minor releases have accelerated too, increasing demands on operations staff and developers.

• The good news is most Spring users are running current versions—and keeping up better than they did in 2021; 70% say they will plan on upgrading to the next major Spring release within twelve months.

• Yet, more than a quarter (26%) of Spring stakeholders now see education and training as a challenge, especially when it comes to finding the right information about how to use modules together and understanding what all the components do and when to use them.

Spring.io was the main source of Spring information in 2022 (chosen by 80%) followed closely by Stack Overflow (77%) and Baeldung (72%). Baeldung (68%) and Stack Overflow (56%) were recognized as particularly good for learning a new Spring feature or capability. The SpringDeveloper Channel on YouTube (34%) was also used as a source of education around Spring.

To support ongoing education and training in response to these findings, VMware has launched its new Spring Academy, which is designed to provide a hands-on learning experience that allows users to apply what they’ve learned and gain the skills necessary to create robust, scalable and maintainable apps.