Monday, March 24th, 2008
Category: Ajax
, Survey
Nitobi ran a survey on Ajax technologies, and you (Ajaxian community) helped out in giving them your feedback.
They just released the results which consists of 570 answers. You must always take results with a grain of salt, since there are quite a few more designers and developers than 570 our there, but it is always fun to analyze. Often the results tell you more about the niche of people that the surveying group has access too than the global truth (e.g. the Ajaxian group skews to a slightly more advanced user base that doesn’t mind getting dirty).
The responses that called out to me were:
Which development platforms are you using?
Java and PHP took the server side piece home (many said they were HTML/CSS front end folks). If you aggregate the Java technology (Java, JSP, Servlets, JSF) you get 394 versus PHPs 296, although it is hard to compare since you could choose “all that apply”. I am willing to bet that if you are doing JSF now, you may well have done Servlets, JSP, and other!
Which development tools do you use?
Eclipse and Dreamweaver had the most votes here, with a large number of Notepad people (teasing?). Textmate was that low?
What causes you the most pain in designing and development websites?
- Browser compatibility: 303
- Testing: 114
- Javascript: 65
- CSS: 36
- Deployment: 34
Why do you choose to use Ajax?
- Improve user’s experience: 276
- I want to build slicker applications: 38
- Easy to use: 29
- My boss wants it: 25
- Saves time: 13
- Saves money: 2
What toolkits or frameworks are you using in your projects?
This was quite a different result than from our last survey.
- jQuery: 144
- Prototype: 143
- Scriptaculous: 127
- YUI: 99
- Ajax for ASP.Net (Atlas): 91
- Mootools: 65
- Dojo: 63
- ExtJs: 61
- Nitobi: 61
- Spry: 29
- GWT: 19
- JMaki: 6
- Mochikit: 2
Here is the spreadsheet of the full results
Friday, January 4th, 2008
Category: Survey
We have been doing various surveys with Richard Monson-Haefel and the Burton Group. We just did one on frameworks that the community uses.
This time around, we want to see what IDEs and tools people are using. To make sure that we have the right tools on the list, we first wanted to ask for feedback on the core list itself. If you see an omission, leave a comment, and we will get the survey ready shortly.
- Dreamweaver
- Standard Eclipse (JST, WST, or ATF)
- MyEclipse
- CFEclipse
- Zend IDE
- Aptana IDE
- JSEclipse
- WebSphere/Rational AD
- IntelliJ
- Visual Studio
- MS Expression Web
- Morphik AppsBuilder
- PrimalScript
- Textmate
- GoLive
- Textpad
- BBEdit
- Komodo IDE
- EditPlus
- Vi
- Emacs
- jEdit
- Notepad
- HomeSite
- Ultraedit
- SlickEdit
Monday, December 17th, 2007
Category: Ajax, Survey
Thanks to the Ajaxian community for getting in feedback so quickly on the third annual survey. Richard has written up his thoughts on the data, which we have to remember, accounts for a small percentage of developers, and those that visit Ajaxian are probably not the norm ;)
That being said, it is interesting to take a peak at the data (which is open for everyone to slice and dice), and Richard has some good thoughts:
What is interesting about the Ajax market is that it’s more diversified in 2007 than it was in 2005 - the number of toolkits keep growing and jostling position in terms of usage. Right now there are 241 Ajax toolkits and related libraries listed in the survey. There were about three dozen in 2005 and 170 in 2006. The number of options is growing.
Prototype and Script.aculo.us are the only toolkits to maintain a lead over the past three years. However, over all there are no clear winners or losers as even the strongest incumbents (i.e., Prototype and Script.aculo.us) are starting too loose ground. Some frameworks initially popular have faded nearly completely out of the market (i.e., xajax and Rico ) while others have have sprung out of nowhere to become leading tookits (i.e., jQuery and Ext JS). The changes over the past three years are easy to see in the stack chart at the end of this blog, which shows the market share of the most popular toolkits - notice how they grow and shrink in market share. That means that the market remains immature.
What is astonishing is the nearly complete lack of commercial Ajax frameworks. Backbase has had a lot of success making a comeback after loosing some market share in 2006, but other commercial Ajax frameworks have not been so lucky.
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
Category: Survey
It’s that time of year again. Richard Monson-Haefel of the Burton Group has created another Ajax survey.
It has three simple questions:
- I am currently using Ajax frameworks, toolkits, or libraries
- I’m using Ajax in conjunction with
- I mostly use the following Ajax frameworks, toolkits, or JavaScript libraries
The list of frameworks is quite huge, but I am sure a pet framework is missing ;)
If we take a minute to answer, we will get the data back to poke at by the end of the week.
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
Category: Survey
We goofed in our recent survey story; we left out MooTools from the “Frameworks” category. While it wasn’t an option in the original survey, over 11% of those surveyed wrote it in. If we’d actually included Moo as an option, it’s likely to have scored even higher.
Many apologies for the gaffe; those responsible have been sacked, spat upon, flogged, and keel-hauled. We updated the PDF with this information as well as the number of respondents: 826.
Friday, October 12th, 2007
Category: Survey
Back in July, we held our third annual Ajax Reader Survey. The results are in. Some interesting observations:
- Prototype and Scriptaculous still dominate the field with 68% and 59% of readers using them, respectively. jQuery has a respectable 48% share. Yahoo UI!, Dojo, and Ext JS round out the top six. Google Gears enjoys usage by 22% of survey participants–pretty amazing for its youth. Despite Java’s popularity amongst our readers, DWR is only used by 13% of readers, which surprised us.
- A little over 50% of readers use PHP, and about 40% use Java. Only 20% of readers use .NET technologies.
- The biggest concern on your mind? Cross-browser rendering issues, with 60% of you listing it as your biggest concern.
What questions/frameworks did we leave out? What do you think of the results?
UPDATE: There were 826 total responses to the survey. (Sorry this was left out of the PDF.)
UPDATE 2: It turns out MooTools received a whopping 11.3% of “Other” write-ins for the Frameworks question. Who knows how high it would have ranked if there was a direct option for it. In any event, we apologize for neglecting to include it.
UPDATE 3: We’ve updated the PDF to include the data in the previous updates.
Saturday, September 23rd, 2006
Category: Survey
The results of our second annual Ajaxian.com survey, prepared by Richard Monson-Hafael from the Burton Group, are in. And the winner is… Prototype, the most popular Ajax framework, by a considerable margin: 43% of you use it. Script.aculo.us is next, at 33%, confirming observations that many of made of the popularity of that duo.
The full results of our framework survey follow:
Note that multiple responses per participant were allowed; we’ve also thrown out any result with less than 3% of responses in the above graphic.
We also asked you about the server-side platform you’re using. The big winner here was PHP, with 50% of you using it:
Some other interesting factoids:
- 25% of you eschew frameworks and work with XMLHttpRequest directly (wow!)
- 11% of you are using JSON to transfer data; unfortunately, we didn’t ask enough questions to determine how this compares with XML or other data formats
- 3% of you are still using Microsoft’s “classic” ASP framework; five of you (~0.6%) are using C++ (+2 points for increased performance, -100 for increased complexity?)
- 2% of you wrote in to say that you’re using Adobe’s Flex toolkit (hey, those banner ads are working out…); 2% also indicated that they use the Flex/Ajax bridge. Unfortunately, the survey software we used doesn’t let us correlate these entries, so we can only say that 2%-4% of you are using Flex in some way
- One participant uses Delphi (how’s that working out for you?), and another is using LISP (can we hire you?).
The survey results are based on 865 participants over the course of a week in September, 2006. The raw results are available.
UPDATED: Changed the wording of the Adobe Flex bullet above to be more accurate.
4.2 rating from 111 votes
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
Category: Survey
Almost a year ago, we posted Burton analyst Richard Monson-Hafael’s Ajax survey, which produced some interesting results.
We’d like to run a new version of the survey this year and see what comes out of it. It’s the same three questions as last year:
Give it a go and let’s figure out how we’re doing Ajax.
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006
Category: Ajax, Survey
According to this recently released report from the Evans Data Corporation, more developers are using Ajax in the emerging markets than they are in North America.
The latest Emerging Markets Development Survey from Evans Data Corp reveals developers in Emerging Markets are embracing AJAX. Over 400 developers from Eastern Europe, Brazil, China, and India contributed to the study. Evans Data Corp found AJAX adoption is generally higher in the Emerging Markets then in North America. Brazil is breaking through the pack with 25% of developers using the technique. China has the lowest adoption rate with a little over 16%, closer to North American levels of AJAX adoption which are just below 18%.
They note that the emerging markets are just adopting it more aggressively than seen before with only an upward slope in the future. They also mention the adoption of other technologies, both web-related and not, such as PHP, Flash, Linux, and Windows.
You can find the full report here.
Friday, June 16th, 2006
Category: JavaScript, Browsers, Survey
While not specifically Ajax-related, I definitely think that this new post on Jeff Attwood’s blog shares some very valuable information about the environment we all develop in - web browsers - and the usage trend he’s seeing on his site.
To get an idea of what web developers are using — as compared to typical web users — take a look at the comprehensive w3schools browser statistics, picking up from mid-2004 when the Google statistics end.
Quite a difference from the other browser market share statistics; IE 6.0 is dominant, but not overwhelmingly dominant to the tune of 95% market share at its peak in late 2004. It’s also interesting that despite being five years old and generally reviled by most serious web developers, IE 6 usage has only dipped ten percent from its historical peak on w3schools.
There are a few other statistics mentioned, including the fact that around 10% of web developers have javascript disabled and only 17% of developers are using a resolution higher than 1024×768.
Thursday, October 20th, 2005
Category: Survey
We announced this weeks Ajax Survey, and the results are now in.
You can check out the results yourself, and even use filters to slice and dice the data, but it is pretty simple to comprehend.
I am currently using Ajax frameworks, toolkits, or libraries
I was really surprised with these results. I expected the real majority to be in the development/prototype buckets, so to see In production weigh in at a second place 31.2% really warms my heart :)
People aren’t just talking about Ajax. Developers are developing and deploying it!
In development came in first with 32.8%.
I’m using Ajax in conjuntion with
This question weighs up the server side technologies backing your Ajax development. PHP was the leader of this category with 40.2%, with Java close behind on 35.1%.
I’m using Ajax in conjuntion with
Here we learn about the Ajax toolkits/libraries/frameworks that you are using. Before the survey was put up, we suggested that the category I use XmlHttpObject directly; I don’t use pre-existing frameworks, toolkits, or libraries. was added, because we had a strong incling that it would be high. This was definitely the case, with 40% of you saying that you use XHR directly for Ajax. Prototype/Scriptaculous came in as the top toolkit 23.1% for Prototype.
What is interesting here is if you think about questions 2 and 3.
The majority of people are using PHP, but results for Sajax/Najax/other PHP frameworks were not very high.
Fewer people are using Rails, yet Prototype/Scriptaculous is the number one framework.
This shows that Rails is really helping us out. It brings helpers for Prototype along for the ride, and you would be a fool not to use them. For other server side frameworks you need to make a choice, and often it seems, the choice is “I will just hack at XHR”.
Thanks for your submissions. This is far from a scientific experiment, but it was fun to see the results. Let us know if you would like to see more surveys and polls in the future, and if so, what on?
Monday, October 17th, 2005
Category: Survey
Richard Monson-Haefel, Sr. Analyst for Burton Group, has posted a very short web survey (3 simple questions) for the Ajax community in order to determine which Ajax frameworks, libraries and toolkits are the most popular. Please take two minutes to fill out the survey. Results will be posted later in the week when the survey is closed.
The questions are:
- I am currently using Ajax frameworks, toolkits, or libraries
- I’m using Ajax in conjuntion with
- I mostly use the following Ajax frameworks, toolkits, or libraries
Click here to take survey
