Mitrais regularly conducts analyses of requests for software developers’ skill from clients and prospects to track market demand. Overall, total demand for Mitrais software developers has increased. We think this may represent an overall increase in demand across the board (driven for instance by FIN Tech), but it could also be influenced by Mitrais’ increased market penetration over the last year. While this analysis is based on our experience, we believe that it is reasonable to extrapolate the demand we have seen for Mitrais developers in a particular technology to the industry more generally. This is a summary of the trends that we have seen in the last 12 months.

Total Demand by Technology

Looking at the relative demand that we have experienced, we have seen major growth around open source technologies, particularly Java Web Technologies (JWT – which we defined as any web-based application developed using the Java language AND an application framework.  Apps developed in pure Java for android for example would fall under our Mobile Capability), Web Front End (WFE), and JavaScript.

Java Web Technologies

For those clients building mission critical applications, the fully featured Java Enterprise Edition is still favoured by clients, while for those not needing this feature list, Spring is clearly the leader over the more lightweight Struts. Spring Boot (Spring’s smaller sibling which allows for rapid development) has shown large growth in demand and that is expected to continue. Java 8 demand is included here, as many clients upgraded from earlier versions in 2018. A similar spike is expected in the next year as the industry moves to Java 11.

Web Front-end Technologies

Angular remains the most popular JavaScript frontend framework, however demand for Vue.js and ReactJS is growing rapidly.

Demand by Region

For more than 25 years Australia has been the key market for Mitrais, but increased demand for Mitrais Software Development from other countries, especially Indonesia, was particularly significant in 2018.

Australia and New Zealand

Growth in requests from ANZ clients and prospects for developers has increased in the three areas of JavaScript, Web Front-end and .NET (or Microsoft Web Solutions which we define as any web-based application developed using Microsoft tools. Typically, these applications use C#, .NET Frameworks, ASP .NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API) during 2018.

Indonesia

Indonesian clients have been increasingly requesting developers with skills in JWT, JavaScript and PHP.

2019 Projections

Early indications are that JWT is still likely to be the fastest growing technology in terms of requests for developers in 2019, followed by Hybrid Mobile (eg PhoneGap, Xamarin, Ionic, Cordova, React Native) and .NET.