Java Community Chooses Best Libraries of the Year: JCP Results

Java Community Chooses Best Libraries of the Year: Overview of JCP Winners

Each year, the Java community summarizes the results of the Java Community Process (JCP) vote, identifying the best libraries, frameworks, and technologies that have had the greatest impact on the ecosystem. In 2024, the results turned out to be particularly interesting — developers bet on performance, security, and simplifying microservice architecture. In this article, we will break down the top three and explain why they deserved the attention of the Java community.

Who voted and how?

The voting was conducted among JCP participants — leading developers, OpenJDK maintainers, corporate representatives (Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Apache Foundation), and active community members. Nominees were evaluated according to the following criteria:

• Impact on the ecosystem — the number of projects using the library;
• Innovation — new approaches to solving old problems;
• Stability and support — frequency of updates and quality of documentation;
• Ease of adoption — how easy it is to integrate the library into an existing project.

1st place: Helidon Níma — reactive microservices without compromise

The winner of the year is the Helidon Níma library from Oracle. This is a reactive framework for building microservices that runs on top of virtual threads (Project Loom). The main advantage is minimal memory consumption and high throughput when processing requests asynchronously. Developers noted that Helidon Níma allows writing code in a synchronous style while achieving the performance of asynchronous solutions.

2nd place: Jakarta EE 11 — evolution of enterprise development

In second place is the updated Jakarta EE 11 specification. The community highly appreciated the long-awaited support for virtual threads in servlets, improved work with JPA, and a new API for JSON processing. Jakarta EE 11 became an important step in modernizing enterprise Java while maintaining backward compatibility with legacy systems.

3rd place: Spring Boot 3.2 — the standard for enterprise applications

Closing the top three is Spring Boot 3.2. Despite competition from Quarkus and Micronaut, Spring Boot remains the most popular framework for building production-grade applications. The new version improves integration with GraalVM Native Image, adds support for HTTP/3, and simplifies configuration for Kubernetes.

What does this mean for developers?

The JCP vote reflects key trends in Java development: the shift to virtual threads, the growing popularity of native compilation, and the drive to reduce overhead in microservices. If you are just starting to learn Java or want to update your technology stack, pay attention to the winners — they will become the industry standard tomorrow.

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