Interesting Java Job Trend Reversals

Back in 2005, Rony Kahan of Indeed.com sent me an email promoting his website. Three years later, Indeed.com is arguably the most useful site for finding jobs and equally importantly discovering job trends. Since I'm in the market, I've been playing with it a bit and found some really interesting trends.

SOA is not just SOAP anymore.

I've written in the past about SOAP and WS-*. It appears that about the middle of '07 the SOAP requirement isn't as important as the SOA requirement (if you know what that means ;-) ).

There's more to Java persistence than EJB or JDBC.

Looks like EJB demand continues to decline and there's a new consensus.

Spring crosses EJB

Spring was certainly a good career bet to have made back in 2005.

Emerging Open Source Java Micro Trends.

Not many open source projects will turn up on an Indeed chart, however for those that do, its high time to pay them due attention. What is surprising is that a lot of these projects have been around since at least '05, but its only in '07 that they're finally gaining traction. Expect interest in these technologies to continue to grow.

Alternative JVM Languages.

Surprisingly, Jython is still king and Groovy is quickly catching up. ( Note: Scala is not on the list because of false hits. ) Notice the Groovy graph, back in '05 there was interest, it died and then came back to life in '07 with a lot more momentum. The Groovy books may have a lot to do with this, and of course a more solid implementation.

Web UI Technologies

JSP and Stuts are still de-facto in the Java world but are declining. Looks like Flex and Ruby on Rails are building serious momentum. Php apparently got a new shot (probably due to IBM) of adrenaline and is now lord of the web development space. Does this mean that we do what Ning did (i.e. PHP frontend plus Java backend)?

Surprisingly Well Below the Noise Level

This graph is a great tell, these technologies are still under the noise level, in fact if you look at the charts, they aren't indistinguishable from noise! But wait, isn't that an Android breakout I see?

A couple words of caution. These graphs are based on Job postings, so they don't necessarily reflect the number of jobs for a skill but rather they reflect the Jobs that are in current demand by employers. So in no way should you think its a proxy for the quality of the tool, after all tools that suck may require more people to maintain them (see PHP)!

It is all too easy to get false hits, so projects who's names are common industrial terms like 'spring', 'struts', 'seam', 'rails' and the like need additional discriminating keywords. Advice, next time you name a project, come up with a unique name!