Redmonk Analyst Fintan Ryan recently published his findings on framework popularity in Java. After completing an in-depth research study on GitHub stars, issues, commits and Twitter followers, Ryan concludes:

Spring still dominates, Spring Boot is on an exponential curve, Netty and Play continue to grow strongly.

Ryan started with the 15 most popular Java framework projects and found a clear divide between two tiers. The figure below shows all the frameworks included in this study.

The top, most popular tier consists of Spring, Play, Netty, Spring Boot, Vert.x, Dropwizard and Spark Java. He conducted the rest of his analysis on these frameworks, looking at GitHub stats, community and commercial contributions, support and licensing.

Netty is particularly interesting in that it had lots of commits from Twitter in 2009 and 2012.

And most of its issues come from Apple (due to a single contributor).

It's also interesting to see that Sony Mobile sponsors most of the Spark Java work. This is because they employ the project's lead engineers.

Beneath this facade of glitzy charts lies a modest interior with not many surprises. Of the open source Java frameworks, the most popular ones are developed by Pivotal, Lightbend, Red Hat and the open source community.

Notably missing from this list is Oracle. However, Oracle's Java EE does provide the infrastructure (e.g. servlets) for many of the frameworks in this study. If Java EE were an open source project on GitHub, how would it stack up against these frameworks? It'll be interesting to see how Oracle tries to regain framework relevancy with Java EE 8. They've committed to a revamped Java EE 8 for the cloud. Several new initiatives surrounding this effort are expected to be announced at the JavaOne conference next week.