Spring Boot and the Peloton

So Spring Boot goes from strength to strength. At RedMonk we’re pretty sceptical of downloads an an indicator of technology attention or adoption – in the age of automated builds, pulling down system images, they can be rather deceptive. But there are some other metrics to consider. In looking at the GitHub landscape for Java frameworks Fintan this week came up with some interesting charts.

His TLDR?

“Spring Boot is growing at an exponential rate and is set to become the most popular Java Framework soon.

The Spring Boot attention graph is pretty crazy – we don’t see it flattening into an S-curve any time soon. Spring Boot will shortly become more popular than its older, less opinionated sibling, the Spring Framework.

It’s a solid data-driven post. But of course we’re only looking at one data point, so I was pleased to see more GitHub data analysis come in from OverOps today. The Takipi blog analysed the Top 100 Java libraries, looking at  47,251 dependencies on Github. While perhaps the most striking insight from the OverOps analysis was the rise of Google’s Guava core libraries for Java, Spring was also notable.

The Spring framework became popular in the Java community as a main competitor to Java EE, and this popularity is also reflected in Github; out of the 100 most popular libraries, 15 are Spring related. The most interesting part here is the meteoric rise of Spring Boot, that allows developers to create Spring-powered applications and services with minimum boilerplate. Do you want to get a production ready Java application off the ground in the shortest time possible?

It was no surprise to see Spring appear on all the slides at an IBM cloud event recently. It is winning. Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) is quickly becoming less viable, but Java itself has some strongly growing communities fostered by both enterprise and Web companies. Spring is a very healthy ecosystem.

IBM, Pivotal and Google Cloud Platform are both clients.