We collected survey results from ~100 users on javalin.io. To filter out non-users (first time visitors, etc) the survey link was only shown to users who had performed at least 8 page loads. A couple of survey result were still from “non-users”, so these have been discarded.
We ran an almost identical survey in 2020. These results are included for comparison. Results have been rounded to the closest whole number (integer).
General
Q: What role best describes you?
This has stayed remarkably stable, so there’s not much to say about it.
Q: What are you using Javalin for?
REST APIs and WebSockets are basically unchanged since last year. Websites shows a small decline in general, but a surprising amount of people have adopted JavalinVue, which is neat.
Q: What language are you using Javalin with?
There seems to be a small decrease of Java users relative to Kotlin users. This doesn’t necessarily mean that there are fewer Java users overall though. The number of downloads is six times higher when this survey was conducted, compared to the previous survey.
August 2021: 130k unique downloads monthly on Maven central, 20k unique website visitors monthly, 4.9k stars on GitHub
March 2020: 26k unique downloads monthly on Maven central, 22k unique website visitors monthly, 3.8k stars on GitHub
Q: Are you using Javalin in production?
This is a big change! It’s hard to say exactly what has happened here, maybe all the people who answered “Soon” last year finally go their apps deployed.
Production usage
Only the users who replied “Yes” to “Are you using Javalin in production” (~60 users) were able to answer the next three questions.
Q: How many requests does your application serve per day?
There is a huge change here, but that’s likely because the question was poorly worded in last year’s survey. The 2020 survey asked “How many users does your application have?”, while this year’s survey asked “How many requests does your application serve per day”, which is a more interesting metric.
Q: Approximately how big is your application?
The previous survey revealed that Javalin apps are growing bigger, and the trend continues this year.
Q: How many people are working on your application?
There is also a pretty big shift here. Javalin apps are serving more requests, growing bigger, and being used in bigger teams. It will be interesting to see the results next year.
Conclusion
Just like the previous surveys, getting people to respond is very difficult. Since the survey didn’t try to be annoying with a popup, it took around two months and ~40 000 website visitors to gather 100 results, and a few of those had to be discarded.
Just like last year, the biggest change in usage patterns is that we have more users working on bigger apps, and working in bigger teams. One new insight this year, is that way more users have deployed their apps to production (twice as many as last year).
We’ll run the survey again next year with the same questions and see if anything changes. Thanks for reading!
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