Survey: Spring Framework Adoption Soars

A recent Evans Data survey shows that adoption of the Spring Framework has grown substantially and continues to grow rapidly.

According to the Evans Data study, which looked at organizations of all sizes, 73 percent of all organizations responded that they use Spring or plan to use Spring within two years; 47 percent responded that they are already using Spring today; and 83 of organizations with 500 or more developers said they are using Spring today.  

Officials at SpringSource, the company behind Spring, said these results further confirm preliminary results from a 2008 Java Trends Survey compiled by The ServerSide, which shows a 78 percent adoption of Spring. Indeed, SpringSource refers to Spring as the de facto standard in enterprise Java, in that Spring is a means of increasing developer productivity and combating complexity in today's enterprise application infrastructure market.

"In years of conducting research, it is rare that a single enterprise-class application technology has near 50 percent penetration, and then soars to near three-quarters adoption in such a short time," said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data. "The research clearly demonstrates significant adoption of Spring, based on clear, concise and measurable benefits."

Click here for an interview with SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson.

Developer respondents said developer productivity and faster project completion were key reasons for their Spring usage. For instance, in the research study, 82 percent of developers said developer productivity is the top reason to use Spring; 61 percent said that replacing EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) with Spring resulted in a more than 25 percent increase in developer productivity and 35 percent said they gained more than a 50 percent increase in developer productivity. And 60 percent of developers surveyed said they experienced 60 percent faster project completion and cited application quality as the top reason to use Spring.

"Throughout the year, we've seen a landslide of data and testimonials supporting Spring's penetration and success throughout the enterprise, dramatically reducing complexity in enterprise Java at a time when organizations need to maximize all of their application and development resources," said Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource. "Enterprise developers and architects have rallied behind Spring as critical to the success of their application infrastructure from inception through production."

Johnson claims that Spring has transformed the enterprise Java landscape and become the most widely used enterprise Java application platform worldwide. Spring has been downloaded more than 5 million times and jobs listings requiring Spring expertise already exceed the number of listings requiring Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere or EJB experience, Johnson said.