For those of us that have been around Java for a while it has been a long, hard road for Java persistence. In a relatively brief period of time we have seen a chaotic flux of persistence solutions - plain JDBC, homemade JDBC utilities, Apache Commons DBUtils, TopLink, Castor/JDO (Java Data Objects), EJB 2.x Entity Beans, iBatis, Spring JDBC, and so on. For most it was a relief that our industry seemed to finally converge on ORM as an imperfect but generally workable, productive solution to the very complex problem of persistence. For many others though persistence remains a highly contentious topic. It is not too surprising then that DZone took up the topic in it's wide ranging 2015 Java Ecosystem Survey. The analysis of the results of that survey will be part of the upcoming 2015 Java Ecosystem Guide to be published during JavaOne (you can register to get it here). Fortunately DZone shared the results with a selected set of MVBs (Most Valuable Bloggers) including yours truly and gave me permission to share some preview perspectives on the data. As the title of this entry suggests the survey results bode very well for JPA.
The survey asked a very simple question - "What persistence tools do you use today?". The answers included the survivors of the Java persistence wars past and some relative newcomers like jOOQ. The answers were mutually inclusive which was a wise choice that reflects reality. As the results highlighted shows, a very strong majority - almost 64% of developers voted for JPA. The closest contender lagging far behind at 37.6% was very old school plain JDBC!
Also very interesting was the fact that Hibernate native was a separate choice that received only about 17% percent of votes. This represents a successful transition from non-standard APIs to open standards based APIs. For context, even after achieving near de-facto dominant position in Java persistence the Hibernate team, Gavin King and Red Hat decided to standardize on JPA. The native Hibernate APIs were also maintained as a matter of legacy as well as a space for value-added features. For a while it was unclear whether the Hibernate community will opt to make the transition to JPA. This survey clearly shows the transition has happened, paving the way for continued healthy competition in the persistence space via JPA.
The surprisingly high usage of plain JDBC is notable as well. Clearly in this day and age one can do far better than using such a low level API. This data point represents an opportunity for further JPA adoption either through advocacy, migration or sensible evolution of the JPA open standard. It also represents an opportunity for more SQL-centric persistence solutions such as relative newcomer jOOQ.
Overall the survey shows a fairly mature Java persistence landscape that still has a few surprises in store for us all to keep an eye on.
