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Server-​​side Technologies | Web Directions

• 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

• Server Hardware and Software
• Databases
• Back end Programming lan­guages and Frameworks

While web devel­op­ment has tra­di­tion­ally focussed pri­mar­ily on the “front end” or client side, and asso­ci­ated tech­nolo­gies like CSS, JavaScript and HTML, increas­ingly, web sites and appli­ca­tions also involve sophis­ti­cated back end programming.

In this sec­tion, we asked about server side lan­guages, frame­works and tech­nolo­gies respon­dents used. It included ques­tions about server hard­ware, server oper­at­ing sys­tems, web servers, data­base sys­tems, and back­end pro­gram­ming lan­guages and frameworks.

For this sur­vey, we also asked a num­ber of ques­tions regard­ing the use of “cloud com­put­ing” resources. We’ve sep­a­rated these into a new, final sec­tion of the report.

Server Hardware and Software

This year, a slightly higher per­cent­age of respon­dents nom­i­nated “shared servers” (32% up from 30%) over “ded­i­cated servers” (31% down from 35%) as the type of server hard­ware their sites are hosted on. This may reflect a small change in the type of respon­dent, with a slightly higher rep­re­sen­ta­tion of free­lancer (21% this year up from 18% in the last sur­vey). Or, it may reflect a rise in the use of cloud based host­ing, as the response “shared servers” is the best fit for those using cloud based host­ing among the responses on offer. The other responses remained more or less the same. We asked about respon­dents use of “cloud com­put­ing” later in the sur­vey, and we cover this in the last sec­tion of the report.

When it comes to server soft­ware, Apache con­tin­ues to dom­i­nate at just under 70%, IIS remains more or less steady at 21%, while no other servers come in at much above 3%. Noteworthy is Nginx, which was not among the list of pos­si­ble responses, but which 3.5% of respon­dents noted when asked which other servers they use.

The rank of server oper­at­ing sys­tems also remained steady, with Linux at 63% (up from 59%), Windows are 25% (down a lit­tle from 28%), Unix also down a lit­tle (14% com­pared with 17%) and Mac OS also down slightly (4.4% down from 5.6%).

What type of hard­ware do your sites run on?

2010

AnswerCount%Dedicated servers man­aged by you or your company44631.81%Dedicated co-​​located servers21715.48%Shared servers45232.24%Don’t know755.35%Other483.42%

2008

AnswerCount%Dedicated servers man­aged by you or your company43335.09%Dedicated co-​​located servers18915.32%Shared servers36829.82%Don’t know625.02%Other403.24%

What server soft­ware is used to serve your sites?

2010

AnswerCount%Apache97969.83%IIS29020.68%GWS70.5%lighthttpd483.42%Nginx543.5%Other1037.35%Don’t know1138.06%

2008

AnswerCount%Apache84968.80%IIS28022.69%GWS50.41%lighthttpd685.51%Don’t know1159.32%Other816.56%

Which oper­at­ing system(s) do your servers run?

2010

AnswerCount%Linux88162.84%Unix19613.98%Windows35225.11%Mac OS X614.35%Don’t know1198.49%Other261.85%

2008

AnswerCount%Linux72558.75%Unix20616.69%Windows34327.80%Mac OS X695.59%Don’t know1139.16%Other262.11%

Databases

As we noted in our last report

When asked “What data­base sys­tems do you use?”, only 3.4% of respon­dents replied “none” — further empha­siz­ing the increas­ing move away from sta­tic page based sites to dynamic sites.

This year, even fewer respon­dents (under 3%) answered none to this question.

As with other aspects of back­end sys­tems we’ve seen, there’s a note­wor­thy sim­i­lar­ity to the results here com­pared with last year as well. The dif­fer­ent sys­tems main­tain the same rank­ing, with only the response “Oracle” chang­ing by more than around a percent.

One area we might expect some dynamism on the back­end is with data­bases, par­tic­u­larly given the atten­tion paid to “NoSQL” in recent times. While we did not give an option of any well known NoSQL data­base among the responses to the ques­tion “What data­base sys­tems do you use?”, respon­dents did have the option of not­ing the other data­bases they use. Here, CouchDB and MongoDB were noted 9 times each, and Cassandra 3 times, sug­gest­ing that adop­tion by our respon­dents of NoSQL data­bases as yet is not match­ing the atten­tion paid to them. It will be inter­est­ing to keep an eye on this in sub­se­quent surveys.

What data­base sys­tems do you use?

2010

AnswerCount%none402.85%MySQL98770.4%Microsoft SQL Server28420.26%Oracle956.78%PostgreSQL14410.27%Other886.28%

2008

AnswerCount%none423.40%MySQL86970.42%Microsoft SQL Server27121.96%Oracle1139.16%PostgreSQL12810.37%Other806.48%

Back end Programming lan­guages and Frameworks

This sur­vey, even fewer respon­dents replied replied “none”, to the ques­tion about which back end pro­gram­ming lan­guages they use, which also empha­sizes the increas­ingly dynamic nature of web sites we noted given the very high per­cent­age of devel­op­ers who use JavaScript, and data­base systems.

In the tables and charts below, the aber­a­tion of JavaScript appear­ing as a lan­guage used by 55% of respon­dents in 2008, and only 7% this sur­vey can be put down to con­fu­sion in the word­ing of the ques­tion last year. Clearly, many respon­dents thought the ques­tion applied to all lan­guages they use, not just those on the back end. We ensured this mis­take was not repeated this year.

Among the pop­u­lar lan­guages we offered as responses, PHP and ASP​.NET remained steady at the top of the rank­ings, Ruby increased in pop­u­lar­ity some­what, though not dra­mat­i­cally, Perl and Java saw a slight decrease, while ASP and ColdFusion both saw notice­able drop offs.

On the server which pro­gram­ming lan­guages do you use?

2010

AnswerCount%ASP986.99%ASP​.NET22616.12%ColdFusion684.85%Java15811.27%JavaScript976.92%Perl1027.28%PHP87562.41%Python15711.2%Ruby22415.98%None443.14%

2008

AnswerCount%ASP14411.67%ASP​.NET20816.86%ColdFusion887.13%Java15212.32%JavaScript68055.11%Perl1038.35%PHP77863.05%Python18715.15%Ruby17814.42%None433.48%Other433.48%

The use of these lan­guages increas­ingly goes hand in hand with frame­works. These frame­works are lan­guage spe­cific — and for some lan­guages, such as PHP, there may be more than one widely used framework.

Again this year, 31% (up a frac­tion from 30%) of respon­dents answered that they use no frame­work for back end devel­op­ment. In com­par­i­son, we saw that fewer than 5% of respon­dents who use JavaScript but who don’t use frameworks.

Of those who do use frame­works, 14% (up frac­tion­ally) use Ruby on Rails (despite Ruby being quite a way down the list of lan­guages, this is the sin­gle most used frame­work. This may be due to the fact that most Ruby devel­op­ers likely started using the lan­guage because of the Rails frame­work.) A small num­ber (1.2%) use the Sinatra frame­work (another Ruby Framework)

The Python frame­work Django stays at num­ber 2, though down markedly from 11% to 6.6%, while the PHP frame­work Zend is steady at a lit­tle over 6%. The other com­monly uses PHP frame­work CakePHP, drops from 6% to 4%.

Last year, the PHP frame­work CodeIgniter from Ellis Labs was men­tioned by 1% of respon­dents. This year, although once again respon­dents had to include it in a list of “other” frame­works, was men­tioned by over 6% of respon­dents. This puts CodeIgniter only slightly behind Zend, and in fourth place of all libraries. It may be that mem­bers of the CodeIgniter community

stacked the results, but a lit­tle dig­ging doesn’t imme­di­ately indi­cate that this was the case. CodeIgniter has cer­tainly gained increas­ing atten­tion, and EllisLabs have long had a fanat­i­cal com­mu­nity around ExpressionEngine, which it seems is trans­lat­ing to CodeIgniter as well.

Node.js has recently also been gain­ing some atten­tion, and so we added this to our list of pos­si­ble responses this year. As yet, with around 1% of respon­dents using it, the inter­est is not being reflected in uptake. But JavaScript on the server­side is gain­ing con­sid­er­able atten­tion, and it will be inter­est­ing to track how node.js and other server­side JavaScript libraries, as well as use of JavaScript on the server more gen­er­ally fare in com­ing surveys.

Which back-​​end frame­works do you use for development?

2010

FrameworkCount%None43330.88%CakePHP563.99%CherryPy40.29%Django936.63%Ext GWT20.14%Ruby on Rails20214.41%Struts271.93%Zend frame­work886.28%node.js171.21%Developed inter­nally24217.26%Other25618.26%

2008

AnswerCount%None36729.74%CakePHP756.08%CherryPy30.24%Django13310.78%Ext GWT40.32%Ruby on Rails16413.29%Struts231.86%Zend frame­work796.40%Developed inter­nally24119.53%Other19916.13%

Of all the areas of the sur­vey, this one saw the least change over the year between the two sur­veys. The effort and invest­ment to change back end infra­struc­ture, cou­pled with the rel­a­tive sta­bil­ity of the back end in com­par­i­son with front end tech­nolo­gies and browsers is result­ing in much less year on year change than we’ve seen in rela­tion to markup, pre­sen­ta­tion, script­ing and rich media. It remains to be seen whether the NoSQL “move­ment”, the rise of server­side JavaScript, and “Cloud Computing” shake up this cur­rently sta­ble aspect of the web devel­op­ment world.

Next

We’ll cover respon­dents use of “cloud com­put­ing” resources as part of their development.