Java Community Sums Up the Year: Best Libraries of 2024 Named

Java community chose the best libraries of the year: who became the favorite of 2024?

The annual vote among Java developers, organized by InfoQ portal and the Devoxx Java community, has concluded with the announcement of winners. This year, over 5,000 specialists from 70 countries took part in the survey. We have gathered the main results to help you stay on trend and choose the highest quality tools for your projects.

Winners in key categories

• Best web framework: Spring Boot 3.2 — the permanent leader, receiving 67% of the votes. Developers noted improved support for GraalVM Native Image, virtual threads (Project Loom), and a new service observation mechanism.
• Best testing library: JUnit 5.11 — the absolute favorite with 82% of the votes. Key innovations: parameterized tests with support for dynamic data providers and improved integration with Mockito 5.0.
• Best utility library: Apache Commons Lang 3.14 — a classic that holds its ground. Users particularly highlighted new methods for working with Records and improved string parsing.
• Best database library: Hibernate 6.4 — winner in the ORM category. The community appreciated support for JSON fields, automatic lazy loading compression, and compatibility with Jakarta Persistence 3.1.
• Best DevOps tool: Maven 4.0 — the updated project builder, which offered a 40% reduction in build time thanks to parallel module processing.

Special nominations and surprises

The jury separately highlighted two libraries that saw the greatest increase in popularity over the past year:

• Quarkus 3.6 — "Rising star" in the cloud solutions category. The framework for creating microservices based on GraalVM showed a 130% increase in interest compared to last year.
• Lombok 1.18.32 — received the "Best productivity" award. The new annotations @WithBy and @Builder.Default reduced boilerplate code by an average of 25%.

Trends of 2024 according to the community

Analysis of the vote revealed three key trends in the Java world:

• Shift to reactive and asynchronous solutions — libraries supporting Project Loom and virtual threads received 45% more votes than in 2023.
• Rise in popularity of native images — tools compatible with GraalVM Native Image (Spring Boot, Quarkus, Micronaut) took top spots in all categories.
• Simplification of configuration — developers are increasingly choosing libraries with "zero configuration", such as Spring Boot and JUnit 5.

The full list of nominees and detailed voting statistics are available on the official InfoQ website. Be sure to try the winning libraries in your projects — many of them are already available for download in the central re