Cost-effective online feedback solutions will provide deeper consumer insight; and can easily be created using a Web survey software solution.

Properly utilizing Web surveys and online survey software, can reduce the administrative costs and complexities; associated with tasks like: developing a customer satisfaction survey, and conducting focused market research.

As well, your Web survey efforts will improve customer satisfaction; and likely increase revenues and promote longevity.

Thank you for sharing your insight and knowledge.

Best wishes.

Al of that is acknowledged in the report.

As much as anything, the goal of the survey was to identify philosophies and trends. It was subjective, not objective, and deliberately so.

This why this survey did not reflect web professional from the ‘third world’, like Indonesia, China, India, etc.

[div id="some_id" onmouseover="some_func()"][/div]

almost everywhere. Unobtrusive JS is an exception to the rule.

Someone else mentioned there were quite a representation of web designers, not just developers, in the survey. Every web designer I work with (10) does not know javascript.

n=1 as always.

Even with my doubts on the data I still think the survey is a very good thing.

I call BS on that. Where is the proof of this?

I still see [paraphrased] all over the net, and all over everyone else’s code. It’s a rare thing in 2008 to see a site using a lot of unobtrusive javscript.

If you look at the percentage who say they use JavaScript (over 90%), and have database driven sites (a similar figure), you can see that what the overwhelming majority of respondents is doing is a lot more than simply marking up HTML.

Now, there are those out there who would might scoff at such efforts as being worthy of the term “developer”, but I’m afraid it seems we’ll have to just get used to that.

The web is democratizing “programming”, “development”, whatever you want to call it in a similar way that the Commodore 64, Apple II, and similar computers did in the late 1970s, and early 1980s, and in a similar way that the web is democratizing other traditionally “elite” activities (from journalism to banking).

Personally, as a computer science graduate with nearly 20 years experience developing and marketing software, and the developer of quite a few web deployed “applications”, I think that that is fantastic. But YMMV :-)

Mac’s as development? That’s ridiculous! Even a large percentage of non-windows developers use windows for php, rails, etc….

I’ve worked for one of the web’s top design firms and quit because the work was too easy and boring. Design firms make pretty sites that are usually handed off to real developers. The code that design firms end up doing are contact us forms and other brain dead easy pages.

I’d like to know how many of these “developers” could even explain what a singleton pattern looks like.

Are the editors asleep?

Dion’s quoted the mainstream press friendly press release there – there’s a lot more substance in the report itself, and you can also see every question, all the answers, and download a CSV of the data used for the analysis.

The other thing to note is that this was in many ways a subjective survey. It asked for philosophies, practices and attitudes to web development, as well as directly about technology. It’s objectively very difficult to learn about these “soft” aspects of development.

To those who made reference to the nature of the sample, we are very up front about who was surveyed – it is definitely early adopter types – those who read blogs like Ajaxian, those who attend conferences and so on. That’s probably why 25% of respondents work in design firms – those sorts of developers are it would seem more likely to be the kind of people who keep themselves up to date with developments.

I definitely think there’s value in learning about the technologies and practices that early adopter developers use. The argument would be that the technologies and practices such people use prefigures what more mainstream developers will be using in coming years. That’s not to say that because a lot more of our respondents use Mac OS X than the market share figures would indicate, then one day soon nearly 50% of computer users will, but rather, it may indicate that the growth in Mac OS market share may well continue.

@axiom – there’s a very big difference between sharing logs (which is essentially what netcraft and other surveys do), and this survey. This survey asked developers what browsers, operating systems and so on they use. The figures for Mac OS are higher than I expected, but if you attend web developer conferences, you’ll anecdotally see that the significant majority of people with laptops have Mac laptops.

@LewisWright, why some of these numbers come in at over 100% is that in many cases, you could provide more than one answer. Clearly some developers use more than one database system for example. In other cases we asked for a single answer (for example primary browser) – so in those cases they should definitely add up to 100% (if you look at the survey results proper, not the made for TV adaptation :-)

Indeed @kriszyp these results are biased. All survey results are – they are in this case biased toward the kind of respondent who attends conferences, reads blogs and web sites focussed on best practice web design and development, speaks English well, and so on. We made all that quite clear in our report. There’s no way we are arguing that the results are representative of all web developers, let alone all computer users. The question is, knowing the nature of the respondents, is there value in knowing their responses to these questions. I’d argue yes – but YMMV :-)

BTW, as the report and data makes clear, of course people use Windows – it’s just that a majority don’t.

Regarding JavaScript on the server side – we too thought that this was high – I think the report concludes as @Joeri did that there was a misunderstanding with that question – it appeared in the “back end” section of the survey, but the question itself asked about programming languages used, and one of the possible answers was JavaScript.

Thanks for the thoughts

john

As much as we all like to think everyone owns a Mac and those ridiculous commercials make us think that the Mac has no problems, a 21% share in Safari seems far fetched.

How about we all share our web logs and come up with a “real” number?

- Nearly half the respondents use Mac OS X Leopard, and over half use a non Windows Operating system.

So no-one uses Windows?

- On the back end, open source accounts for the majority of technologies used. Among server operating systems Linux at nearly 60% is used more than twice as often as Windows at 28%, with Unix also well represented at 17%. Even Mac OS X, which is usually far down survey lists for server OSs, is used by 5.5% of respondents.

Again, this adds up to 110.5?!?

- Over 90% sites are database driven, with the open source MySQL at 70% and PostrgeSQL at 10% together accounting for the significant majority of sites by respondents. Microsoft’s SQL Server at 22% and Oracle at 9% were the other widely used database systems.

70% + 10% + 22% + 9%?