Estimated Website and Web Application
Programming Language and Development Tool Popularity
Software Components Popular with hibernate
[Revert to General Popularity]
Overview
We estimate the relative popularity of programming languages, libraries, frameworks and other development tools using the Applied Stacks structured wiki. The wiki documents one or more of the specific backend software components behind almost twenty thousand websites and web applications. While this is just a small fraction of millions of sites and online applications in existence today, it represents the most comprehensive documentation project of its kind and should serve as an interesting sample regarding the popularity of various web development tools.
Co-occurence Analysis
Unlike most prior work on developer tool popularity that only reports one or more static rankings, the rankings given here can by dynamically conditioned on tool co-occurence. For example, in the general ranking, Mason is only reported as being used on 1.3% of websites. However, if we restrict ourself to websites that also reported using Perl, we discover that 31.9% of the Perl based websites report using the Mason framework.
Such co-occurence analysis should be quite useful, as it allows people to explore what other software components best complement the tools already being used on a project. Moreover, when someone is considering making a radical jump, from say using something like Java to Erlang, the Erlang co-occurence rankings will bring them quickly up to speed on what useful software components are available for their new language.
Suggested Usage
Like the wiki itself, it is hoped that the information presented here will assist developers in making better more informed decisions when selecting the best tools for their projects. However, when choosing between components, we encourage developers to not just use raw popularity in making their selection. Rather, tool popularity should be only used to complement other more critical criteria such as ease of use, developer productivity, documentation quality, runtime performance, and security concerns1. While relative popularity does act as a rough "wisdom of the crowds" surrogate for the overall quality of a tool, it is still very susceptible to hype, fashion, and accidents of history. By simply picking the most popular tools you may end up missing out on much better ones that could give you a significant competitive advantage.
1 For example, does a given framework or other component have a history of security flaws? Or, does a particular language encourage developers to write robust safe code, or does it have certain language features that tend to result in vulnerable code?
Reporting Bias
When interpreting the results, be aware that they are biased by both who decides to submit their site to the wiki and by what sorts of components they decide to report. For example, the millions of blogs running Wordpress likely vastly outnumber the quantity of Django based websites. However, the rankings below put Django at about 9% of all websites/apps, while Wordpress achieves less than 1.0%.
People setting up Wordpress blogs, particularly those setting them up on a non-techie friendly site like wordpress.com, don't typically think it's important to announce to the world what software backend they're using. In contrast, people are often very enthusiastic about their programmer centric web framework of choice such as Ruby on Rails or Django and are more likely to share whatever interesting sites they've built with them. Similarly, people also tend to under report certain classes of components, such as operating systems and databases. For example, while Linux powers a very large number of websites, less than 0.1% of the sites in the wiki list Linux as a component. Similarly, MySQL is the predominate database for web applications, but it is only reported here as being used on 2.6% of the sites.
Helping Us Improve
The rankings are generated live from the wiki. As the wiki grows, the rankings given here should become increasingly more useful and informative. To help us improve, please take a minute to submit information on any websites or web applications you've helped develop. Doing so is easy with the quick submit forum. Everything that is submitted is made Freely available under both the GNU Free Document and Creative Commons Share Alike License.
Rankings
for Software Components Popular with: hibernate
[Revert to General Popularity]
| Rank | Component | % Usage |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Java | 99.0 % |
| 2 | GORM | 98.0 % |
| 3 | Grails | 96.9 % |
| 4 | Groovy | 96.9 % |
| 5 | MySQL | 5.1 % |
| 6 | jQuery | 3.1 % |
| 7 | Spring | 3.1 % |
| 8 | couchdb | 2.0 % |
| 9 | AOPAlliance | 1.0 % |
| 10 | Apache_Commons_Lang | 1.0 % |
| 11 | AppFuse | 1.0 % |
| 12 | Avalon | 1.0 % |
| 13 | Echo2 | 1.0 % |
| 14 | EJB3 | 1.0 % |
| 15 | Erlang | 1.0 % |
| 16 | GoogleMaps | 1.0 % |
| 17 | JavaScript | 1.0 % |
| 18 | Jetty | 1.0 % |
| 19 | JSF | 1.0 % |
| 20 | Log4j | 1.0 % |
| 21 | MPXJ | 1.0 % |
| 22 | reCAPTCHA | 1.0 % |
| 23 | RichFaces | 1.0 % |
| 24 | SiteMesh | 1.0 % |
| 25 | Swing | 1.0 % |
| 26 | WebWork | 1.0 % |
Related Resources
- TIOBE Programming Community Index contains heuristic programming language ranking based on search engine document counts.
- LangPop.com provides multiple rankings based on individual search engines, social bookmarking & news aggregator sites, open source project websites, job boards, book counts, and the number of people in IRC channels.
User generated content is licensed under the terms of the GFDL and/or the CC By SA License.
