10 kickass-technologies-modern-developers-love

10 KICK-ASS
TECHNOLOGIES MODERN
DEVELOPERS LOVE
GEEKS REVEAL THE INDUSTRY'S BEST TECH
Is geek love better
t han nor mal love?
All rights reserved. 2014 © ZeroTurnaround Inc. 1

Introduction to the geek love fest
Have you ever heard the question: “How do you know
if you’re in love?”
Well, forget that. We’d rather know “How do you know
when a technology is going to change your life?”
So we asked ourselves, how is it possible to identify
which technologies are loved and chosen specifically by
geeks...and to understand why they are chosen?
In part, yes. We have statistical evidence from
three years of developer surveys about dozens of
technologies, but this is about more than just market
share or t-shirt coolness that influences our judgement
in these matters. It’s never only based on one element,
so here are some we thought about, in order of
importance (or gravity):
1. Market data (raw % of market, relative size of
market, level of fragmentation)
2. Developer feedback (i.e. explicit responses
from surveys)
3. Amount of buzz about it (press coverage,
social media share, community presence)
4. Anecdotal evidence (personal conversations,
stories, gut feeling)

So, in alphabetical order, here are 10 top technologies
the modern developer loves:
1. CONFLUENCE
2. GIT
3. GRADLE
4. GROOVY
5. INTELLIJ IDEA
6. JENKINS
7. JIRA
8. MONGODB
9. SCALA
10. TOMCAT + TOMEE
HONORABLE MENTION: JREBEL*
*At first we debated whether it was too biased to include a tool made
by the vwsame organization that sponsors RebelLabs, but with clear
statistical evidence of love for JRebel by developers, it deserves an
honorable mention :)
Obviously, the prerequisite here is that the technology
needs to visibly provide value on some level, solving
problems or inefficiencies that exist in software
development or reimagining something better altogether.
Each of these technologies has a story behind it,
usually a good one, and supported by a culture and
a reason for existing not born out of dreaming about
riches. We believe this is what geeks are drawn too.
Something personal, with a pulse.
So we went out in search of the heart behind that pulse
and contacted as many leaders as we could from among
the target technologies. With a couple exceptions, we
got direct quotes from the right people, giving us greater
insight into what the future holds for the technology
itself and the space in which it lives.

First Release: 2005
Latest Release: 2.0.1
Interesting Facts: Git was first designed and developed
by Linus Torvalds himself, for Linux kernel development.
Git is a distributed revision control and source code management
system made by Linux creator Linus Torvalds in between fits
of rage directed towards certain less-awesome contributors to
the Linux kernel.

Git has taken over where Linux left off separating the geeks
into know-nothings and know-it-alls. I didn’t really expect
anyone to use it because it’s so hard to use, but that turns out
to be its big appeal. No technology can ever be too arcane or
complicated for the black t-shirt crowd1.
– LINUS TORVALDS,
Creator of Git (and Linux)
In 2012, Git was gaining traction in a market
dominated by Subversion (SVN), but still had
far to go. Fast-forward to 2014 and we see a
different scenario--whereas DVCS competitor
Mercurial stayed with more or less the same
as two years prior (about 1 in 10 devs), Git
has gained more fans quickly, over-taking
Subversion for the first time and propelled by
the community activities of GitHub, Atlassian
and others. GitHub is so synonymous with Git
these days that some developers accidentally
refer to GitHub as their DVCS technology of
choice, whereas it's more accurately a value-adding
provider of tools and services on top of
Git. No matter. (1) http://typicalprogrammer.com/linus-torvalds-goes-off-on-linux-and-git/

Over the last few years, Git and Subversion seem
to be trading market share with each other, while
Mercurial maintains the stable #3 position (much
like NetBeans in the IDE segment). CVS, without
a new release since 2008, is understandably not
gaining market share.
Source: Combined from 3 annual surveys by ZeroTurnaround

First Release: 2012
Latest Release: 2.0
Interesting Facts: Unlike Ant and Maven, Gradle decided to
go a different route with a Groovy DSL for configuration
and scripts. It took 3 years and 11 milestones to go from
v0.7 in 2009 to v1.0 in 2012.
Gradle is a build tool that automates build test, deployment
and more. Unlike other build tools, it is powered by DSL
configuration. Rumors are emerging that Gradle can even
be configured to build you.

With only 11% of the share of the build tool
market, Gradle was nonetheless the most
interesting technology for the majority of 2164
developers when asked about this segment.
In a space that has seen relatively little
movement or large innovations since Maven 2
back in 2005, Gradle has certainly captured the
attention of Java devs that are tired of market
dominator Maven's XML footprint and
Ant + Ivy's long list of issues. Doubling in
market share since 2012, Gradle is Groovy DSL
based, configurable in a billion ways and even
let's you launch an empty build script.
Source: Java Tools & Technologies Landscape for 2014

Gradle is popular I think because it provides the sweet
spot between too much rigidity and not enough structure.
Gradle has a very powerful and fast executional layer and the
industries best dependency management. Gradle is the first
build system that has a true multi-platform approach, and
it’s easy to extend with deep APIs and extensions that are
first class citizens.
In the future, I would love to see better support for JavaScript,
improved Gradle IDE integration particularly with Eclipse, a
powerful project template system and juicier project reports.
Additionally, a full Gradle plugin lifecycle management
solution. One that makes it super easy to create and maintain
high quality Gradle plugins. A solution that for example
continuously integrates the community plugins with the latest
Gradle versions and vice versa. The first building blocks are
now out there with the Gradle plugin portal and the Netflix
Nebula effort but a lot more can be done.
– HANS DOCKTER,
Creator of Gradle
Nearly 6 in 10 developers want to learn about
using it, even though it required some Groovy
knowledge--that, plus Google has officially
selected it to be the future official build tool for
Android. Which, isn't much until it's actually in
use, but a strong indication that Gradle is
a tool chosen by geeks.
The geek love is strong
wit h t his one...

First Release: Jan 2007
Latest Release: 2.3
Interesting Facts: Did you know that a third of the
downstream traffic in the US is coming from Netflix?
And that that huge traffic goes through various layers
of Groovy? That makes Netflix the biggest deployment
at scale of Groovy!
Groovy is an OO programming language that runs on the JVM.
It also retains full interop with the Java language. Despite
popular belief, Groovy was not first invented by flower children
in the 1970s.

Groovy was not the first JVM alternative of
choice for developers, but the general vibe is
that Groovy is also something to look into--at
least for for nearly 1/3 of developers. For many
developers used to coding in Java, the first hint
of Groovy comes by trying Gradle, which is a
Groovy DSL build tool getting a lot of attention
these days.
Groovy, and related tools like Grails, Gradle and
Griffon, have propelled into the minds of nearly
1 in 3 developers, according to a recent survey,
and gearing up to either co-exist or challenge
Scala in the enterprise development world.

Groovy often goes head-to-head with
Scala for the position of supremacy in the
alternative JVM language segment--in 2012,
Groovy was first in use on alternative projects,
with Scala in 2nd place. We predict eventually
that one or more major entities (probably
in something like media, transportation or
banking) will provide either language the boost
towards dominance by fully adopting something
other than Java for mission critical applications.
Groovy success is mainly due to its familiarity with Java.
Developers want to get things done, they want to master the
language quickly, they want power features. Groovy's a more
productive language than Java, but still with a similar Java
syntax that is already well known. And on top of that, Groovy
simplifies mundane tasks that used to be complex to develop.
Personally, I'd like to see full pattern matching coming to
Groovy. We already have some forms of destructuring with
multiple assignements, of matching with our enhanced
switch / case, etc. But we could go beyond and offer some
more advanced pattern matching capabilities, that would
help working with complex object hierarchies (like our AST
transformations do). In the future, we’ll see more convergence
and similarity between languages — at least in terms of
features, if not necessarily in terms of syntax. Today, a modern
language has to have a functional flavor, for example,
but syntax varies.
– GUILLAUME LAFORGE,
Groovy Project Lead

First Release: 2001
Latest Release: 13.1
Interesting Facts: IntelliJ is actually an Open Source
project hosted on GitHub, with over 130,000 commits
to date!
IntelliJ IDEA is an IDE developed in Java with advanced code
navigation and code refactoring capabilities, supporting
development in many languages including Java, Scala, Groovy
and Android. IntelliJ also boasts the most outspoken community
of crazed developers in love with it.

We've all run into an IntelliJ IDEA fanatic at one
time or another, and the main takeaway from
many of these encounters is something like
“you’re an idiot for not using IntelliJ.”
Regardless, since we last looked in 2012,
the IntelliJ “fanboy-ism” in the IDE segment
has led to a change in the landscape dominated
by Eclipse, whose market share is slowly
eroding. IntelliJ, now used by 1 in 3 developers,
is also the most interesting IDE for almost half
of the developers we asked (49%), leading us
to finally ditch all the anecdotal evidence
that IntelliJ rocks and finally proclaim it
“chosen by geeks” officially.
Even though IntelliJ IDEA focuses sales of its
commercial version, it is nonetheless used by
33% of developers overall. As the only non-free
IDE with any sizable market share, it is also very
popular and interesting to developers--nearly 50%
of those surveyed would rather use IntelliJ IDEA
than any other IDE.

Must...use...IntelliJ!
If you ask why I think IntelliJ is successful, I’d say that it’s
due to us listening to the community and being ourselves
part of our own target audience. We’d love to see more
development of plugins with educational focus, as well as first
class pure functional languages support. These days, there’s
a lot requests for better Git support, namely support for Git
submodules. Over the next decade, I think we’ll see most
currently existing functionality inside of paid development
tools become free, although I’m no oracle :)
– MAXIM MOSSIENKO,
Development Department Lead at JetBrains

First Release: Jan 2011 (2005 as Hudson)
Latest Release: 1.5.7.1
Interesting Facts: Jenkins was born when the Hudson
project, created by Sun Microsystems, was forked when
questions grew over control or stewardship of the
project. Since then, Jenkins popularity has soared,
while Hudson tends to be used more for legacy projects.
Jenkins is a Continuous Integration tool, that provides automatic
build triggering from VCS commits and much more. Jenkins can
probably be customized via the Internet of Things to make your
drinks, but won't physically serve them to you.

Things are finally looking better for application
development these days--over 80% of
developers are finally using Continuous
Integration to make sure they don't keep
breaking their app before it even gets launched.
Bravo! Joking aside, Jenkins has an almost
laughably dominant position in the CI server
segment; with founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi
leading the way, a strong community of active
plugin developers and a group of geeks even
using it to trigger their office coffee machines,
Jenkins is definitely a geek's choice.
With 70% of the CI market on lockdown and
showing an increasing rate of plugin development,
Jenkins is undoubtably the most popular way to
go with CI servers.

When asked about future development of Jenkins, it’s usage
is so diverse it's hard to say what users want most—but
generally users demand everything and expect it be done
yesterday! What made Jenkins successful is the increasing
need for more automation, and it just so happened that
Jenkins is extensible and pluggable enough to let people do
what they wanted. I'd love to see more participation in the
community, such as more development, more knowledge
sharing, etc.
– KOHSUKE KAWAGUCHI,
Creator of Jenkins
Jenkins has
nearly 1000 plugins
available!

JIRA
First Release: 2002
Latest Release: 6.2
Interesting Facts: JIRA is used for issue tracking and project
management by over 25,000 customers in 122 countries
around the globe. That's a lot of issues!
CONFLUENCE
First Release: 2004
Latest Release: 5.5
Interesting Facts: Confluence dropped wiki markup support
in version 4, but geek pressure brought it back as a
plugin which provides XHTML-based source markup.

JIRA is an issue tracker that provides issue
management, workflows, task assignment,
and much more. Confluence is a collaboration
tool used to create content and share across
a team, with support for tracking requirements,
retrospectives and more. JIRA and Confluence
are not the only products Atlassian makes,
but we put them together here because they
are both Atlassian products are designed to
work in conjunction.
With JIRA and Confluence, Atlassian has become
one of the first coder-centric companies to branch
into the mainstream, giving non-technical folks in
technical environments a chance to understand
WTF is going on. With the exception of Skype,
developers are using Confluence even before other
tools *actually intended* for communication.
Source: Developer Productivity Report 2013

JIRA is far and away the most used issue tracking
tool used by modern developers, with an
adoption of 57% in our Developer Productivity
Report 2013. Runner up GitHub landed in
second place place at 21.7% with others being
spread below 10% each. It also has an positive
effect on the predictability of software delivery,
as the same report shows, JIRA users having
an increase of 2% in predictability of software
delivery. Confluence on the other hand,
a content and collaboration tool, is used by
29.7% of respondants as a communication tool
if you can believe it, with Skype the only tool to
beat it. But with a 3% increase in predictability
of software releases, it made the cool list.
In the next 5-10 years, I see companies embracing tools
that people actually want to use. It's totally backwards that
people use better software at home than they do at work.
Historically, we've seen strong JIRA and Confluence adoption
among software development teams and internal IT teams,
but more and more we're seeing non-technical teams using
our tools to accomplish their most important work.
Regarding JIRA's success, it's always been driven by its
breadth of functionality and accessible price point. As we've
worked over the years to improve JIRA's user experience,
design, and integrations with other Atlassian products, it has
become more ever more popular among teams of all types
and sizes. Confluence owes a lot of its success to the success
of JIRA. Software development and IT teams typically seek
JIRA to manage their projects first, and then seek Confluence
to collaborate around technical documentation and other
valuable content. In cases where teams are using both tools
it is important to them that relevant information is is always
up-to-date, easy to find, and at their fingertips without
context switching.
– RYAN ANDERSON,
Product Marketing Manager for Confluence

First Release: 2007
Interesting Facts: MongoDB is both the product name and
the company name. Previously, the company was called
10gen, but nobody knew who they were until you said
"You know, the MongoDB people", so they bit the bullet
and changed their name to MongoDB!
MongoDB is a document database that supports programming
languages to map data types directly to documents in the
database. MongoDB is not the technology from the film
Blazing Saddles.

The world of NoSQL databases is still certainly
maturing: compared to many of the big SQL
players from the 90s like MySQL, Oracle
DB and PostgreSQL, the NoSQL group of
cool newcomers is dominated by MongoDB
(56%) released in 2009. To be fair, only 39%
of developers surveyed use NoSQL at all,
compared to 92% for usage of SQL, but we see a
much more evenly-spaced market share layout
for SQL technologies. MongoDB has become
a dominating force in it's market, fueled by
massive growth and community action,
making MongoDB a choice worthy of a geek.
I do believe for database tools that "one size fits all" is over,
but I don't think you want a dozen different tools that you
have to be an expert on. You want three of four and some
of those are your existing tools: an RDBMS and maybe some
data warehousing technology. You're going to add a NoSQL
database to that toolbox. We are seeing a lot of usage by big
Global 2000 companies now. NoSQL in general and MongoDB
is getting to be something that's used by companies of all
sizes if they write any apps at all2.
– DWIGHT MERRIMAN,
Founder of MongoDB
(2) http://www.fastcolabs.com/3021910/founder-of-mongodb-has-only-one-wish

MongoDB is the dominant force in this maturing
NoSQL market, where other interesting players
like Neo4j and Hazelcast are also gathering
supporters.

First Release: 2003
Interesting Facts: Scala was voted the most popular
JVM scripting language at the 2012 JavaOne conference.
In January 2014, the Redmonk Programming Language
Rankings report placed Scala 13th, one place
above Haskell!
Scala is a JVM language that provides support for OO and
functional programming. It is a statically-typed language with
full interop with Java, even though a lot of Java devs are still
scratching their heads in WTF mode with it most of the time.

Scala has come a long way since its 1.0 release
back in 2004 and has grown to be one of the
most interesting languages running on the
JVM. When we recently asked developers
"which alternative JVM language they would
be most interested in learning", 47% listed
Scala as their next choice. When nearly half
of Java developers out there go for Scala, it's
got to be for a good reason. In the build tools
segment, disproportionate interest in Scala's
SBT compared to real-life usage leads credence
to the idea that Typesafe's focus and the
community backing of the Scala ecosystem of
tools, including Akka, Play and so on,
is culiminating in a general trend.
Scala has evolved a lot since its inception in 2004. Its user
base has grown to a size I could have never imagined back
then, and has been picked up in industries ranging from
major enterprises, financial institutions, to startups. Being
recognized by RebelLabs is a huge honor and validates
the work we're doing to create an elegant and powerful
programming language.
– MARTIN ODERSKY,
Creator of Scala
Developers are start ing
to really love alternat ive
J V M languages

With interest in learning Scala shown by nearly
half of the developers surveyed, Typesafe's
surrounding ecosystem of tools like Play,
Akka, Slick and sbt might be readying for battle
with Groovy in turning Scala a real enterprise
alternative to Java.

TOMCAT
First Release: 1999
Interesting Facts: Tomcat was originally a merger of Sun
Java Web Server code and ASF RI if Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1,
hence starting at v 3.0.x
TOMEE
First Release: April 2012
Latest Release: 1.6.0.2
Interesting Facts: TomEE is certified for Java EE 6 web
profile and aimed at Java EE 7 full profile.

Tomcat is the leading free, open-source Java
Application server people turn to when writing
Java Web Applications requiring JSP and Servlet
support. TomEE provides Java EE support to the
existing Tomcat base, retaining the Tomcat look
and feel. Neither Tomcat nor TomEE require
a litter box.
With Tomcat in use by an even 50% of
developers surveyed, there is no doubt as to
which application server is the first one people
think of when it comes to Java development.
TomEE, an extended profile for enterprise
developers that even partially supports Java
EE7, is now professionally supported by creator
David Blevins' company Tomitribe. Both
Tomcat and TomEE are geeks' choices
because their popularity and high usage by
development-only teams, where production
servers are not considered.
Tomcat, long the indie developer's hero, is now
used extensively in enterprises, namely when
development teams get to choose their own app
servers. This is where TomEE comes in: as the
natural extension of Tomcat into Java EE, TomEE
combines the huge community of Tomcat with the
attention to enterprise needs.

I think one factor for our success is our religious adherence
to all things Tomcat. TomEE is the Java EE version of
Tomcat, the most popular Java app server out there, and it's
supported by all tools that support Tomcat, whether those
tools know it or not. While TomEE works out-of-the-box with
Tomcat tools, many have added support that takes advantage
of the extra features TomEE brings. JRebel was actually the
first back in 2012, and Intellij, Jelastic and most recently
NetBeans are proud supporters.
These days what our users want most for TomEE is Java EE 7
support, and many of the Apache projects we need for Java EE
7 are nearing completion. Although the core of TomEE is very
good and always getting tighter, I'd like to see improvement
is in the professional dressing around the project. Many
people have praised the documentation, but I still see room
for improvement, and more frequent releases is also quite
high on my list. We've also done two security releases in the
last quarter, each timed right behind the respective Tomcat
security releases. We need to keep that up.
– DAVID BLEVINS,
Creator of TomEE
TomEE gets closer to
Java EE 7 full profile support

First Release: 2007
Interesting Facts: The cumulative time that JRebel
technology has saved developers is over 1 developer's
full lifetime! That's some serious redeploy time!
JRebel is a productivity tool for Java, Groovy and Scala
developer's. The tool eliminates build, compile, redeploy and
restart time from a development cycle. If you are a slow or
unnecessary part of the Java EE development cycle, watch out.
HONORABLE MENTION

You only need to speak to a JRebel user to hear
how grateful they are the project exists and
how thankful they are that they're using it! In
a development world with containers, large
applications and very few ways to hot reload
your code, JRebel is the most popular way to do
this with Java Resources, Classes and Framework
code. Its user base is ever increasing with an
extremely high renewal rate. JRebel are easily
the market leaders for this type of tooling, and is
an essential for large enterprise environments.
Our 2013 Developer Productivity report shows
that a statistically significant increase of
8% in predictability of software delivery is
seen by JRebel users.
To avoid additional survey bias in our 2013
report, JRebel customer records were matched
with the email addresses of survey respondents.
When the analysis was over, we found that JRebel
users are able to predictably launch software
8% more than the median of 61%.
Source: Developer Productivity Report 2013

The biggest reason for JRebel’s success is actually the
ignorance of the technical challenge—when developers finally
see how coding in Java can be without any delays then it’s
like a lightning bolt! We constantly hear from users about
more and more integrations with 3rd-party frameworks and
commercial platforms, but what I’d really like to see in the
future with JRebel is support for test-driven development
(TDD) workflows. For the long-term, I hope that we'll see the
appearance of novel development platforms with interactive
support and first-class verification/introspection built-in.
– ANTON ARHIPOV,
JRebel Product Manager at ZeroTurnaround
We hear t hat upcoming
JR ebel 6 has some major
ne w features...

Conclusion: Recognizing Geeky Excellence
As we said in the beginning, there is no single factor that indicates
developers love for any particular technology, nor is there a single
reason why developers love these technologies in the first place. These
technologies cover many different aspects of the software development
market, and this awesome brew of JVM languages, IDEs, app servers,
build & productivity tools are all celebrated choices of geeks...
And on that note, RebelLabs plans to announce its own annual
Geek Choice Awards to recognize technologies like these!
Some technology awards are based on submissions, which means the
outcome is greatly determined by the number of incidental supporters that
cast votes during a specific time period. We think it's better to already be
awesome and then receive the recognition of an award for no reason other
than to say “Thank you for making the software game brighter!”
So to kick off the very first Geek Choice Awards 2014, we’ve decided to
give an award to each of the technologies covered in this report. We’ll be
announcing it more loudly in conjunction with the folks we talked to in this
report later on, so stay tuned for more from us on that. Got a technology
you think rocks and should be considered for an award next year?
Let us know in the comments section of the HTML version,
or by tweeting us @rebellabs.
R ebelLabs launches
new annual awards!

THANKS FOR READING!
NO DEVELOPERS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS REPORT : )
We would like to thank the subject matter experts (SMEs) quoted
in this report, the authors, editors & reviewers from ZeroTurnaround,
our sponsor that made it possible to create this report. Stay tuned for more
from RebelLabs, and tell us what you think on
Twitter @RebelLabs.
Check out all our reports here: http://rebellabs.org

Report Author:
Oliver White (@theotown), Simon Maple (@sjmaple)
Report Designer:
Ladislava Bohacova (@Ladislava)
Contact Us
Twitter: @RebelLabs
Web: http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs
Email: labs@zeroturnaround.com
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