Enterprise Java Developers Shifting To The Cloud

Enterprise Java developers are increasingly moving to the cloud according to a new survey from Replay Solutions, which describes itself as a maker of “application life-cycle, software debugging and problem resolution technology.”

The Replay survey reveals data about enterprise Java developer usage patterns with Java servers, platforms, and IDEs (integrated development environments). And the results show that there is significant interest, active evaluation and testing of cloud applications built on Java.

Indeed, 36 percent of the survey’s respondents said they would either test or deploy parts of cloud infrastructure in 2010. Similarly, 35 percent of respondents said they expect a twofold or higher increase in virtual machine deployments in 2010. Also, 29 percent said they expect to see a two-time to 10-time increase; and 6 percent said they expect more than a 10-time increase.

“We conducted this survey for our own internal product planning purposes but wanted to share the results with the Java community because of the size of the sample and the activity around Java cloud apps development,” Jonathan Lindo, CEO of Replay Solutions, said in a statement. “While the survey validated our approach with JBoss, Tomcat, WebLogic and WebSphere developers, we were actually surprised at the unexpectedly high percentage of enterprise Java developers who are proactively testing or deploying cloud infrastructure in 2010.”

Regarding Java EE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition) application servers, 50 percent of respondents said they use Tomcat, 37 percent use IBM WebSphere, 22 percent use Oracle’s WebLogic and 18 percent said they use Red Hat’s JBoss.

As far as which platforms they run Java applications on, 57 percent of respondents said they expect to run Java applications on Windows. 35 percent said they use Red Hat or CentOS Linux and 18 percent use Solaris.

Moreover, regarding favorite Java application development tools, Eclipse was by far the most popular IDE in the survey. Indeed, 66 percent of respondents said Eclipse was the most important Java EE IDE, 17 percent chose NetBeans and 12 percent chose Oracle’s JDeveloper.

Replay conducted its survey in March 2010 with a focus on enterprise developers using, deploying or supporting Java EE applications. There were 1,106 respondents.

The full results of the survey are being made available to the community here.