Azul 2026 State of Java Survey & Report: Where webforJ Fits

Earlier this year, Azul, a Java-focused company, released its 2026 State of Java Survey & Report. Based on responses from over 2,000 Java professionals worldwide, Azul revealed that developers are focused on managing cloud computing, securing apps, and controlling AI output.

Java remains a dominant force in development, with 64% of respondents reporting that more than half of their apps or workloads are built with Java or run on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). For developers who wish to bring their apps to the browser with minimal changes to their architecture, webforJ offers a strategic approach to modernizing apps quickly and efficiently.

Handling cloud computing

An increasing demand for browser-based apps and globally accessible data requires more cloud computing. For 43% of the respondents, JVM-based workloads now account for over half of their public cloud compute spend. 97% of organizations in the survey are taking multiple actions to reduce these costs, with the majority opting for a high-performance Java platform.

With webforJ's performance-first, thin-client architecture, it transmits only the necessary event messages and employs a lazy-loading strategy. Only loading the data that needs to be shown drastically increases resource allocation density and reduces processing time. Developers were also interested in having more secure apps.

Making apps secure

The majority of enterprise development time is spent addressing security risks. 56% of organizations manage Java-based Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) daily or weekly, while 30% of DevOps time is lost to false-positive investigations. Furthermore, 63% of respondents report that dead or unused code greatly impacts DevOps productivity.

webforJ offers a structural solution by implementing a unified Java architecture. By eliminating the traditional JavaScript/HTML frontend stack, enterprises can effectively "starve" security risks by focusing solely on protecting the JVM. webforJ encapsulates business logic entirely on the server, preventing client-side logic manipulation, a primary driver of the daily CVE cycle. webforJ also communicates between the client and server through obfuscated messages and events, providing a layer of defense against data scraping and unauthorized API probing.

Controlling AI output

We're in the midst of an "AI Explosion" within the Java ecosystem. 62% of survey respondents use Java to implement AI features, reflecting a growing trend of adding AI to existing systems, and 30% of all new Java code is now AI-generated. However, the rush to automate has led to hallucinations because the AI model infers framework conventions, resulting in code that appears syntactically correct but fails at runtime due to a lack of architectural context.

The webforJ Model Context Protocol (MCP) server addresses this by providing a necessary foundation of knowledge. The MCP server plugs AI assistants directly into a "single source of truth," giving access to the live webforJ documentation, APIs, and design tokens. This makes the generated code adhere to verifiable framework rules rather than statistical guesses.

You can read the MCP Server docs to find out more about how the webforJ MCP server can help you in your app development.

Final words

The Azul 2026 Survey has given us insights into the current state of Java development, and webforJ is uniquely positioned to help those developers with their next project. By using a resource-efficient architecture to slash cloud compute costs, centralizing logic on the JVM to eliminate frontend security vulnerabilities, and having access to an MCP server with precise, context-aware info for AI code generation, webforJ empowers developers to build with confidence.