The Wrap | Web Directions

The Wrap

• About the Survey
• The Audience
• Operating Systems and Browsers
• Markup
• CSS and Presentation
• JavaScript and the DOM
• Rich Media
• Server tech­nolo­gies
• The Cloud
• Conclusions and predictions

In last year’s report we concluded

• Open Source solu­tions dom­i­nate, or play a very sig­nif­i­cant role in most areas other than client oper­at­ing systems.
• Respondents saw them­selves pre­dom­i­nantly as “devel­op­ers” ahead of “designers”.
• Current browsers, not legacy browsers come first for devel­op­ing and testing
• Among respon­dents, adher­ence to the use of stan­dards, and rec­om­mended prac­tices (or at the very least, accep­tance of their impor­tance) is strong

This year’s sur­vey did noth­ing to under­mine those con­clu­sions, if any­thing rein­forc­ing them.

However, we also observed last year

• Despite the buzz around “cloud com­put­ing”, there was lit­tle if any men­tion of cloud based solu­tions for host­ing, par­tic­u­larly ser­vices like Amazon’s EC2 and S3
• Despite the hype around iPhone, and Android, [devel­op­ers’] focus is squarely on tra­di­tional web brows­ing plat­forms — the lap­top and PC

Here, it’s fair to say there have been not­i­ca­ble changes.

More than 1 in 5 respon­dents replied that they “rely on “Cloud Computing” resources” in their devel­op­ment. Last year, while we didn’t ask specif­i­cally about cloud based resources, where rel­e­vant in the sur­vey both Amazon Web Services and Google AppEngine were each men­tioned only once.

The results when it comes to the “non desk­top” web are more mixed, but there are def­i­nitely some moves afoot here as well. Last year, 25% of devel­op­ers said they “optimize[d their] sites for devices other than laptops/​PCs”. This year this is just under a third of devel­op­ers. So a notice­able, but not dra­matic change.

Other con­clu­sions we can draw from this years sur­vey include the following

• The Mac OS is now solidly entrenched as the num­ber one oper­at­ing sys­tem of choice by respon­dents. Does this reflect devel­op­ers’ desires to focus on devel­op­ing for the iPhone (and iPad, which had been announced a week or two before the sur­vey began)?
• Webkit is fast gain­ing on gecko as the #1 browser engine choice among devel­op­ers. This goes hand in hand with the sud­den uptake of CSS3 seen in the sur­vey, and may well be closely related to the Mac OS mar­ket­share among devel­op­ers, and of course the iPhone’s wide­spread (but far from ubiq­ui­tous) use by our respondents.
• The non-​​desktop web is slowly but surely arriv­ing, but the rel­a­tively small increase in the num­ber of respon­dents opti­miz­ing their sites for non desk­top browsers is note­wor­thy. Will the arrival of the iPad, and rumored Google Chrome based tablet com­put­ers later in 2010 change things?
• CSS3 is see­ing a very rapid uptake among devel­op­ers, with around half of all respon­dents claim­ing to use it.
• From a stand­ing start web fonts have taken off dra­mat­i­cally in the 13 months between sur­veys. Will they cross the chasm, to main­stream web developers?
• Developers are show­ing con­sid­er­able inter­est in HTML5 markup and APIs, though HTML syn­tax still reigns supreme among respondents
• jQuery is even more dom­i­nant than in our pre­vi­ous sur­vey — used by close to 80% of all respondents.
• Despite being hyped by some as indus­try chang­ing, desk­top application-​​like libraries such as Cappuccino and SproutCore have gained lit­tle if any trac­tion with respon­dents. Whether they do hinges in part on whether desk­top metaphors become the dom­i­nate metaphors for web appli­ca­tions, and given the increas­ing vari­ety of devices the web runs on, this is far from certain.
• The Cloud makes a splash, with over 20% of respon­dents in this sur­vey rely­ing on cloud based resources, aboveall storage.
• For all the recent inter­est, NoSQL has yet to reg­is­ter sig­nif­i­cant use by respondents.