Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

• 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

2008

What server software is used to serve your sites?

2010

2008

Which operating system(s) do your servers run?

2010

2008

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

2008

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

2008

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

2008

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.