Java developers are diving into – or at least being tipped into – the wonderful world of microservices but junking the monolith is inevitably throwing up new problems as they make the transition.

A report from Perforce, which markets Java tools JRebel and XRebel, found that 50.88 per cent of 399 respondents said microservices was the architecture for the main application they developed. Just under 28 per cent focused on a monolithic architecture, with 9.77 per cent saying SOA.

Microservices were on the radar for all but 15.29 per cent of developers, with 27.57 per cent of Java devs already working on fully-microservices based applications, 36.09 per cent currently transitioning and a further 21.5 per cent “talking about it”.

But new architectures mean new problems. The “biggest challenge” when it came to microservices was “setting up the development environment locally”, which was ID’d by 41.35 per cent.

Next up was troubleshooting inter-service functionality issues, at 38.85 per cent, while troubleshooting inter-service performance issues was an issue for 29.07 per cent. Scaling and monitoring in production was flagged up by 28.2 per cent, while 33.58 per cent had trouble with the overall performance of the distributed system.

Unsurprisingly, given the shift to microservices, the most popular virtualisation tool was Docker, used by 73.93 cent of respondents, with Kubernetes being used by 35.34 per cent. VMware was in third place with 17.79 per cent.

Other findings were, perhaps more familiar, with Java 8 being the main language for 58.40 per cent of developers, with Java 11 picking up 22.56 per cent, and Java 12 or newer just 5.51 per cent.

When it came to application servers, Tomcat was the clear winner, with 61.01 per share share, with Jetty a distant second on 12.91 per cent. Things were even more unequivocal when it came to runtime platforms, with Spring Boot grabbing 82.7 per cent share. Similarly, when it came to IDEs, 81.7 per cent of respondents plumped for IntelliJ IDEA.