Java Community Chooses Best Libraries of 2024

Java Community Chooses Best Libraries of the Year: Java Library Awards 2024 Results

The annual Java Library Awards, organized by Java Code Geeks portal with support from Oracle, has announced the voting results from developers. This year, over 12,000 Java programmers from 87 countries participated in the voting. We have gathered the main winners in key categories.

Winners in Main Categories

• Best General-Purpose Library — Apache Commons (4th consecutive win). The set of utilities for working with collections, IO, math, and strings remains indispensable in 87% of Java projects.
• Best ORM Library — Hibernate. Despite competition from jOOQ and MyBatis, Hibernate confidently maintains its leadership thanks to Lazy Loading and Jakarta Persistence support.
• Best Testing Tool — JUnit 5. The platform with modular architecture, dynamic tests, and extensions is recognized as the standard for unit testing.
• Best Web Development Library — Spring Boot. Millions of developers value auto-configuration, embedded Tomcat, and the Spring Cloud ecosystem.

Special Nominations 2024

• Breakthrough of the Year — Virtual Threads API (Project Loom). The library for lightweight threads, built into JDK 21, has changed the approach to concurrent programming. It allows creating millions of threads without overhead.
• Best Data Library — Apache Kafka. The streaming platform surpassed RabbitMQ and Redis in the number of industrial deployments (74% of respondents use it for event-driven architectures).
• Best DevOps Tool — Maven. The build system remains the de facto standard: 68% of projects use Maven versus 24% Gradle.
• Library for Microservices — Micronaut. Won due to fast startup (less than 1 second) and low memory consumption.

Trends and Surprising Results

This year, experts highlighted three key trends:

• Rise of Reactive Streams — Project Reactor and RxJava entered the top 10 libraries for high-load systems.
• Return of Jakarta EE — after rebranding, Jakarta Faces and Jakarta REST received 23% of votes in the "Web Frameworks" category.
• Integration with AI — the Deep Java Library (DJL) from AWS made the shortlist for the first time, showing a 340% increase in interest in machine learning on the JVM.

The full list of winners and technical reports from the awards ceremony are available on the official awards website. For Java developers, these results are an excellent guide when choosing tools for new projects.

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