A new productivity report on Java shows rapid growth in the use of AI tools by developers. Currently, more than 75 percent are using these tools, although 12 percent of respondents said their company prohibits their use.
The report comes from JRebel by Perforce, with JRebel being a productivity tool for Java developers, DevClass writes.
In 2025, 731 developers, team leaders and executives working with Java participated in the survey. This represents an increase from the 440 respondents in the 2024 report. How the respondents were selected is not mentioned. There is probably some bias toward Perforce customers and users of JRebel tools.
12% do not use AI tools
The 2024 report stated that only a small fraction of respondents (8 percent) used AI tools to write code. This while the new report reports that only 12 percent of respondents said they did not use AI tools. Another 12 percent said their company does not allow the use of AI tools. This is somewhat confusing wording, but implies that more than 75 percent of teams are now using AI.
Unfortunately, the report contains several inconsistencies, suggesting that Perforce may have been in a hurry to publish. Nevertheless, no one doubts the rapid adoption of AI tools.
GitHub Copilot is the most popular choice among respondents, followed by ChatGPT. The main uses of AI are code completion (60 percent), refactoring (39 percent) and error detection (30 percent).
The survey asked respondents about their primary JDK distribution, but the percentages add up to more than 100 percent. This suggests that the question may have been interpreted as asking about which JDK distributions are in use – another indication of a sloppily executed survey.
Only 42 percent use Oracle Java
Yet we learn that only 42 percent use Oracle Java. Amazon Corretto, at 23 percent, comes close to matching Adoptium, the Eclipse Foundation’s JDK distribution. Despite the sometimes difficult relationship between AWS and open source, the cloud giant is a major player in the open source community. Companies deploying their applications on AWS may choose Corretto because of its support and the fact that Amazon uses Corretto internally for their own production services.
Indeed, AWS is the cloud provider of choice among respondents, with 51 percent usage. Microsoft Azure follows with 27 percent and Google Cloud with 19 percent. Interestingly, 20 percent indicated they do not use a cloud provider at all.
Longer microservices startup time
One of the problems is the longer startup time of microservices. 44 percent of respondents noted an increase in startup time, presumably compared to previous years. For 10 percent, this time increased by 25 percent or more. Longer startup times affect application performance after a reboot and can be a problem for applications that scale by launching additional instances.
After questions about the inconsistencies in the data, Perforce announced that their team had updated the report to correct the errors and thanked DevClass for flagging the problems.