Updated 2026: ZeroTurnaround was acquired by Perforce in 2017 and subsequently wound down. The yearly Java landscape reports are no longer published, but the 2016 edition is still accessible for historical reference.
Every year, ZeroTurnaround published a survey of Java tools and technologies among professional developers. I looked forward to it because it was one of the few places that gave an honest, data-driven picture of what the Java ecosystem actually looked like in practice, not what vendors said but what developers were actually using.
What I found useful about this report Link to heading
The report covered build tools, IDEs, testing frameworks, application servers, and more. A few things stood out in the 2016 edition:
- Maven still dominated builds, but Gradle was growing fast, especially in Android and microservices teams. (This trend continued: by the early 2020s, Gradle had become the default for new projects in many shops.)
- IntelliJ IDEA was steadily eating Eclipse’s market share among professional developers. The report confirmed what I was already hearing from colleagues.
- JUnit 4 was universal, but JUnit 5 was on the horizon. TestNG had a loyal following but wasn’t gaining ground.
- Spring Boot had already become the dominant framework for new Java services.
At the time of writing, I was thinking seriously about switching from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA. The report’s data (strong satisfaction among IntelliJ users) was one of the nudges that pushed me to make the switch.
Updated 2026: I did switch to IntelliJ IDEA. No regrets.
If you’re curious about where the Java ecosystem was a decade ago, the 2016 report is an interesting historical snapshot. The trends it identified (Gradle growth, IntelliJ adoption, Spring Boot dominance) all played out more or less as the data suggested they would.