A survey of 879 enterprise developers and architects from Vaadin, a provider of framework for building Java applications, found that, as part of modernization efforts, the pace at which Java applications are moving to the cloud is now accelerating.

The survey found more than one-third (36%) of Java applications are already deployed in the public cloud. More than half of respondents (56%) are also already deploying some of their Java applications into Kubernetes or serverless environments. Nearly two-thirds (63%) said they planned to move more Java applications to the cloud over the next 24 months, the survey also found.

Kim Weins, vice president of product and marketing at Vaadin, said the survey makes it clear that enterprise IT organizations are still highly committed to Java. Still, there is a clear shift underway in terms of where those applications are being deployed. More than a third of respondents (35%) said they have Java applications deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), while 22% have deployed them on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Another 11% are running them on the Google cloud platform.

This shift, however, will take time. Almost half (47%) of Java applications still need modernization. As a result, 63% of respondents planned to increase their investments in modernizing existing Java applications.

Maintainability is the top-ranked motivation for modernizing Java applications (32%), followed by security (20%) and ongoing maintenance costs (10%), the survey found.

The top three challenges in developing Java applications are building an intuitive and simple user interface (81%), upgrading the tech stack (81%) and ensuring app security (78%).

There is also a shift underway in terms of the frameworks used to build and modernize applications using a more cloud-native approach. A full 70% of respondents use Spring today, but 50% also noted they are planning to increase their use of Spring Boot. Other Java frameworks used include Vaadin Flow, Quarkus, Hilla and React. While derivatives of Spring are the dominant framework, it appeared more organizations are at least evaluating other options, noted Weins.

Most organizations are also integrating Java applications with modern tools for logging (72%), observability (61%) and single sign-on (53%), the survey found.

The shift to Java 17 is also well underway, with nearly three-quarters of respondents (73%) using or planning to use it over the next year. More than a quarter (26%) are already on Java 17 or a later release. Another 21% are currently upgrading, while 26% plan to update in the next 12 months.

Overall, the survey found Java is being widely used for both internal (64%) and customer-facing (62%) applications. Java is most often used to build full-stack Java apps (70%) and backends (69%), the survey found

Finally, the survey found more than a third of respondents (38%) expected that finding and retaining developers would be a significant challenge in 2023.

There are, of course, no shortage of options when it comes to deploying Java applications. Most organizations will deploy Java applications everywhere from the network edge to the cloud. The one thing all these applications will have in common is they will be written in a venerable programming language that itself has been modernized.