Friday, April 9, 2010

Java Platform Survey Results - Flaws and Observations

I love surveys and analyzing the resulting data from them, so was interested to take a look at Replay Solutions write up from their 2010 Java Platform Survey.  Unfortunately, as is the case with many survey's, the way the data is presented has some issues that could result in folks making the wrong conclusions.

Rich correctly pokes holes in the report pointing out the strange grouping of results, the significant "other", and the egregious omission of GlassFish from the survey (quite possibly the bulk of the 18% "other").  If GlassFish was even only half of the "other" it would be 9% and equal to Jetty and way ahead of Jonas/JRun/Orion (which were grouped together for some reason) and Resin, each at only 2%, which would seem to clearly justify GlassFish being called out on its own.  They do provide the raw data which is fantastic, but re-analyzing the data can't fix not asking the right questions.

But there were a few other items in the report that I found interesting.

The "most important Java IDE in 2010" is, no surprise, Eclipse, but NetBeans is a pretty solid #2 at 17% ahead of JDeveloper at 12%.  This would seem to support Oracle's decision to not kill NetBeans, but it is still unfortunate that it appears to be being relegated to a minor role.

And given all the noise about the Cloud, only 14% of the respondents indicate they will be deploying to the Cloud in 2010 with an astounding 67% having no plans.  Now I'm sure the adoption is still way up from 2009 and 14% is still significant, but the IT industry still appears to be cautious about going hole hog into the Cloud.  For those looking to use the Cloud, Amazon EC2 is still dominant at 13% but with "other" at 14% there seems to again be a missing option in the questions.

As far as operating systems for deployment go, Windows is no surprise leading at 57% but with Red Hat Linux at 35% well ahead of Solaris (18%) and other Linux variants close behind Solaris (SUSE 12%, other Linux 16%), Linux is arguably threatening Windows for the #1 spot.

Last, it is a bit of an odd question on frameworks and services as options to answer included everything from Spring to JMS to ESBs, but it is interesting to see that messaging/integration technologies like JMS and ESB at 29% and 24% are well ahead of Swing and JPA (21% and 15%) and not that far behind Spring and Hibernate (36% and 37%).

As always, data is fun to look at.

1 comment:

  1. Eduardo Pelegri-LlopartApril 9, 2010 at 11:35 AM

    Not listing GlassFish is a significant mistake and there are other issues, but I think the deeper question is what sample population was used. For example, my guess is that this would have been drawn from the ReplaySolutions list of contacts; if that was the case, that introduces a significant bias on the population.

    I'll confess I am also annoyed by the way the Java logo was used w/o consulting people at Sun/Oracle. IANAL, etc, etc, but at the least, common courtesy suggests they would go ask for permission...

    ReplyDelete