I maintain a page on zeef.com about the upcoming Java EE 8 specification . On this page I collect all interesting links about the various sub-specs that will be updated or newly introduced in EE 8. The page is up since April last year and therefor currently has almost 10 months worth of data (at the moment 8.7k views, 5k clicks).

While there still aren't any discussions and thus links available for quite a couple of specs, it does give us some early insight in what's popular. At the moment the ranking is as follows:

If we look at the single highest ranking link for each spec, we'll get to the following global ranking:

Interestingly, when we don't look at the single highest clicked link per spec, but aggregate the clicks for all top links, we get a somewhat different ranking as shown below (the relative positions compared to the first ranking are shown behind each spec):

As we can see the specs that occupy the top 5 are still the same, but whereas JSF 2.3 was the most popular sub-spec where it concerned a single link, looking at all links together it's now MVC 1.0. The umbrella spec Java EE however is still firmly on top. The bottom segment is even exactly the same, but for most of them very few information is available so a block is basically the same as a link. Specifically for the Java EE Management API and JSON-P 1.1 there's no information at all available beyond a single announcement that the initial JSR was posted.

While the above ranking does give us some data points, we have to take into account that it's not just about the technologies themselves but also about a number of other factors. E.g. the position on the page does influence clicks. The Java EE 8 block is on the top left of the page and will be seen first by most visitors. Then again, CDI 2.0 is at a pretty good position at the top middle of the page, but got relatively few clicks. JSF 2.3 and especially MVC 1.0 are at a less ideal position at the middle left of the page, below the so-called "fold" of many screens (meaning, you have to scroll to see it). Yet, both of them received the most clicks after the umbrella spec.

The observant reader may notice that some key Java EE technologies such as JPA, EJB, Bean Validation and Expression Language are missing. It's likely that these specs will either not be updated at all for Java EE 8, or will only receive a very small update (called a MR or Maintenance Release in the JCP process).

Oracle has indicated on multiple occasions that this is almost entirely due to resource issues. Apparently there just aren't enough resources available to be able to update all specs. Even though there are e.g. dozens of JPA JIRA issues filed and persistence is arguably one of the most important aspect of the majority of (web) applications, it's just not possible to have a major update for it, unfortunately.

Conclusion

In general we can say that for this particular data point the web technologies gather the most interest, while the back end/business and supporting technologies are a little less popular. It will be interesting to see if and if so how the numbers will change when more information become available. Java EE Management API 2.0 for one seems really unpopular now, but there simply isn't much to measure yet.

Arjan Tijms