The State of Web Development 2006/2007 Lachlan donald Lachlan Donald is Lead Developer for SitePoint,'s web development team, which is responsible for building and deploying solutions for businesses. He works on a daily basis with dynamic languages on a variety of platforms, and specializes in building accessible content management applications Lachlan completed his Bachelor of Computer Science with Honours, as the top-scoring student of the year. Prior to joining SitePoint, he worked in a variety of positions, in- cluding consulting roles at the Bureau of Meteorology, James Cook University, and Nick Langmaid Nick Langmaid started in the information technology industry in 1976 as a mainframe systems programmer In the 30 years since, he has worked for many companies, large and small, designing and implementing systems to satisfy their business needs Nick is the principal consultant at Solution Space, and specializes in requirements management and software system design. In addition to working with the SitePoint team, Nick is currently working with one of Australia's largest companies to use web technologies to extend and modernize its retail point-of-sale operations Nick lives with his wife Anne and two children. When time and weather permit-which is all too rarely-he enjoys flying light aircraft. Matthew Magain Matthew Magain holds a Master of Engineering degree and one half of an Associate Diploma in Graphic Design, qualifications that reflect his love for both the creative and technical aspects of the Web. His first taste of web programming came during a research posting at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he has been jumping back and forth between client-and server-side projects ever since Matthew has worked as a consultant for IBMs Business Consulting Services, as a freelance web developer, and as an English teacher in Japan. Since joining SitePoint as a Technical Editor he has edited several books, including lan Lloyd's Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML 8 CSS, commonly accepted as the best beginner's web design book on the market Matthew lives with his wife Kimberley and their daughter Sophia lan muir Ian Muir is Ektron's go-to web guy. a web developer by trade, he is also a web content management and Ektron CMS400 NET evangelist. Ian develops and teaches Ektron's Certified Developer Training Program, works with customers and partners deploying web sites, and cultivates the company's growing user community Ian is the architect of the Ektron DevCenter, a site dedicated to providing web de- relopers, designers, and webmasters with a range of resources to support them in building web sites, intranets and extranets, and applications. /books/html/ Copyright o 2006, Site Point and Ektron. Purchase the full report today!
The State of Web Development 2006/2007 Lachlan Donald Lachlan Donald is Lead Developer for SitePoint’s web development team, which is responsible for building and deploying solutions for businesses. He works on a daily basis with dynamic languages on a variety of platforms, and specializes in building accessible content management applications. Lachlan completed his Bachelor of Computer Science with Honours, as the top-scoring student of the year. Prior to joining SitePoint, he worked in a variety of positions, including consulting roles at the Bureau of Meteorology, James Cook University, and Channel 9. Nick Langmaid Nick Langmaid started in the information technology industry in 1976 as a mainframe systems programmer. In the 30 years since, he has worked for many companies, large and small, designing and implementing systems to satisfy their business needs. Nick is the principal consultant at Solution Space, and specializes in requirements management and software system design. In addition to working with the SitePoint team, Nick is currently working with one of Australia’s largest companies to use web technologies to extend and modernize its retail point-of-sale operations. Nick lives with his wife Anne and two children. When time and weather permit—which is all too rarely—he enjoys flying light aircraft. Matthew Magain Matthew Magain holds a Master of Engineering degree and one half of an Associate Diploma in Graphic Design, qualifications that reflect his love for both the creative and technical aspects of the Web. His first taste of web programming came during a research posting at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he has been jumping back and forth between client- and server-side projects ever since. Matthew has worked as a consultant for IBM’s Business Consulting Services, as a freelance web developer, and as an English teacher in Japan. Since joining SitePoint as a Technical Editor he has edited several books, including Ian Lloyd’s Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS, commonly accepted as the best beginner’s web design book on the market.1 Matthew lives with his wife Kimberley and their daughter Sophia. Ian Muir Ian Muir is Ektron’s go-to web guy. A web developer by trade, he is also a web content management and Ektron CMS400.NET evangelist. Ian develops and teaches Ektron’s Certified Developer Training Program, works with customers and partners deploying web sites, and cultivates the company’s growing user community. Ian is the architect of the Ektron DevCenter, a site dedicated to providing web developers, designers, and webmasters with a range of resources to support them in building web sites, intranets and extranets, and applications. 1 http://www.sitepoint.com/books/html1/ Copyright © 2006, SitePoint and Ektron. Purchase the full report today! 4
The State of Web Development 2006/2007 lan is a promoter of open source projects in ASP. NET, and of collaborative events such as BarCamp. He has extensive experience with PHP, Cold Fusion, C#f, and VB. NET. He graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Arts degree in New Media Kevin Yank Kevin yank is the technical director of sitepoint and oversees all of its technical publications-books, articles, newsletters, and blogs. He has written over 50 articles for Site Point on technologies including PHP, XML, ASP. NET, Java, JavaScript, and CSS Kevin writes the SitePoint Tech Times, SitePoint's biweekly technical newsletter for web developers, which has 120,000 readers worldwide. He is also a sought-after speaker, presenting regularly at conferences such as Web Directions and Fundamentos Web. However he is best known for his book Build Your Own database driven website Using PHP MySQL. Kevin enjoys performing improvised comedy theater and flying light aircraft Our Findings The State of Web Development Survey 2006 informed this report, to provide us with insight into current and important developments in the world of the Web. Much of the data reinforces our ideas about what is happening but some questions have uncovered new trends within the developer community. This report presents the raw data from the survey, interpreted via expert analysis and commentary to present some thought-provoking ideas about what it all really means findings. A glossary of abbreviations and terms is provided at the end of the repo and a precis of our We provide a brief breakdown here of the subjects covered by the 15 questions who responded The survey received an enormous response from both the Ektron and SitePoint developer communit ies. Just over 50% of the survey participants are actively employed in the Internet industry, and the rest work with the Web in varying capacities within other industries Of the former, 40% are freelance developers or owners of web design/development companies, and 12% work for a web design/development company Of the remaining 48%, about 30% administer or manage a company's or organization's site, with 5% managing their own ecommerce sites. The remaining 18% is almost evenly split between students at 8%, and the ever-popular"other"category at 10%. This distribution shows that a good cross-section of web professionals participated in the survey, rather than just one specific group. design practice in the real world There aren' t a whole lot of surprises emerging from the questions about standards compliance and standards-based design. About 17% of the people surveyed use pure CSs to lay out their pages while 69% mostly use CSS and only occasionally resort to table-based layouts in the sites they build Almost 78% of respondents validate their markup, with 25 of developers going the extra mile to maintain 100% standards-compliance with their code. A promising trend is evident-developers across the board are recognizing and implementing web standards. Data from some of the other questions also supports the contention that more web professionals are creating sites to meet web 2http://www.sitepoint.com/books/phpmysqll/ Copyright o 2006, Site Point and Ektron. Purchase the full report today!
The State of Web Development 2006/2007 Ian is a promoter of open source projects in ASP.NET, and of collaborative events such as BarCamp. He has extensive experience with PHP, ColdFusion, C#, and VB.NET. He graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Arts degree in New Media. Kevin Yank Kevin Yank is the Technical Director of SitePoint, and oversees all of its technical publications—books, articles, newsletters, and blogs. He has written over 50 articles for SitePoint on technologies including PHP, XML, ASP.NET, Java, JavaScript, and CSS. Kevin writes the SitePoint Tech Times, SitePoint’s biweekly technical newsletter for web developers, which has 120,000 readers worldwide. He is also a sought-after speaker, presenting regularly at conferences such as Web Directions and Fundamentos Web. However, he is best known for his book, Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL.2 Kevin enjoys performing improvised comedy theater and flying light aircraft. Our Findings The State of Web Development Survey 2006 informed this report, to provide us with insight into current and important developments in the world of the Web. Much of the data reinforces our ideas about what is happening, but some questions have uncovered new trends within the developer community. This report presents the raw data from the survey, interpreted via expert analysis and commentary to present some thought-provoking ideas about what it all really means. We provide a brief breakdown here of the subjects covered by the 15 questions, and a precis of our findings. A glossary of abbreviations and terms is provided at the end of the report. who responded The survey received an enormous response from both the Ektron and SitePoint developer communities. Just over 50% of the survey participants are actively employed in the Internet industry, and the rest work with the Web in varying capacities within other industries. Of the former, 40% are freelance developers or owners of web design/development companies, and 12% work for a web design/development company. Of the remaining 48%, about 30% administer or manage a company’s or organization’s site, with 5% managing their own ecommerce sites. The remaining 18% is almost evenly split between students at 8%, and the ever-popular “other” category at 10%. This distribution shows that a good cross-section of web professionals participated in the survey, rather than just one specific group. design practice in the real world There aren’t a whole lot of surprises emerging from the questions about standards compliance and standards-based design. About 17% of the people surveyed use pure CSS to lay out their pages, while 69% mostly use CSS and only occasionally resort to table-based layouts in the sites they build. Almost 78% of respondents validate their markup, with 25% of developers going the extra mile to maintain 100% standards-compliance with their code. A promising trend is evident—developers across the board are recognizing and implementing web standards. Data from some of the other questions also supports the contention that more web professionals are creating sites to meet web 2 http://www.sitepoint.com/books/phpmysql1/ Copyright © 2006, SitePoint and Ektron. Purchase the full report today! 5
The State of Web Development 2006/2007 standards. Just over 39% of developers list accessibility as a topic they want to learn about, 33% would like to see more resources available, both online and offline for learning XhtMl CSS tools of the trade The information gathered about server platforms is more unexpected. At 68%, PHP is by far the most common language being used by developers, but what we find interesting is that about half of the PhP developers surveyed also work with at least one other language. When developers were asked what server platforms they planned to learn about in the next 12 months, Ruby (at 24%)and ASP.NET 2.0(at 22%)were the most popular choices. These results suggest that many web developers might get started with PHP, then move on to object oriented languages such as Ruby, NET, and JSP It's also surprising that classic ASP is still the most common of the Microsoft languages, but as mentioned previously, there's a growing interest in learning ASP. NET 2.0 resources for learning Several of the survey questions related to the trends that developers are following. Respondents most commonly cited best practices and design as the areas of web development that they wanted to learn about Search engine optimization and usability were the next most popular choices. When web developers were queried about the technologies for which they'd like to see more resources 47%nominated AJAX. Next up was the XHTML/CSS combination, followed by JavaScript and JavaScript libraries ontent management When queried about the type of content management system(CMS) they were using, respondents were split fairly evenly between those who use a home-grown CMS, those who have acquired an external CMS (open source or commercial), and those who use no CMs at al adoption of web technologies In addition to an increase in the use of AJAX/Java Script, the survey's respondents show an interest in using more community-oriented tools. In response to the question of which technologies they plan to use in the next 12 months, 37% of developers intend to use blogs in their development projects, 25% aim to use podcasting, and 20% mean to use wikis. Another question asked respondent to indicate the kinds of resources they use to stay up to date. Of the respondents, 96% use online articles, but 60% also use forums, and 55% also use blogs. While articles are respondents'main source of information, less formal communication tools, such as blogs, forums, and wikis, are be- coming increasingly important resources the future of the web The survey revealed some very interesting trends in how the Web is evolving. Developers and de signers are placing more emphasis on creating rich user interfaces, using AJAX and Flash. Standards compliance is a concern for the majority of web professionals. Finally, creating object oriented code and working with languages that provide solid frameworks on which functionality can be developed rapidly-such as Ruby and ASP. NET-are on the horizon for most developers. The Web is clearly moving in a direction that is both improving the user experience and creating more efficient code Copyright o 2006, Site Point and Ektron. Purchase the full report today!
The State of Web Development 2006/2007 standards. Just over 39% of developers list accessibility as a topic they want to learn about, and 33% would like to see more resources available, both online and offline, for learning XHTML and CSS. tools of the trade The information gathered about server platforms is more unexpected. At 68%, PHP is by far the most common language being used by developers, but what we find interesting is that about half of the PHP developers surveyed also work with at least one other language. When developers were asked what server platforms they planned to learn about in the next 12 months, Ruby (at 24%) and ASP.NET 2.0 (at 22%) were the most popular choices. These results suggest that many web developers might get started with PHP, then move on to object oriented languages such as Ruby, .NET, and JSP. It’s also surprising that classic ASP is still the most common of the Microsoft languages, but as mentioned previously, there’s a growing interest in learning ASP.NET 2.0. resources for learning Several of the survey questions related to the trends that developers are following. Respondents most commonly cited best practices and design as the areas of web development that they wanted to learn about. Search engine optimization and usability were the next most popular choices. When web developers were queried about the technologies for which they’d like to see more resources, 47% nominated AJAX. Next up was the XHTML/CSS combination, followed by JavaScript and JavaScript libraries. content management When queried about the type of content management system (CMS) they were using, respondents were split fairly evenly between those who use a home-grown CMS, those who have acquired an external CMS (open source or commercial), and those who use no CMS at all. adoption of web technologies In addition to an increase in the use of AJAX/JavaScript, the survey’s respondents show an interest in using more community-oriented tools. In response to the question of which technologies they plan to use in the next 12 months, 37% of developers intend to use blogs in their development projects, 25% aim to use podcasting, and 20% mean to use wikis. Another question asked respondents to indicate the kinds of resources they use to stay up to date. Of the respondents, 96% use online articles, but 60% also use forums, and 55% also use blogs. While articles are respondents’ main source of information, less formal communication tools, such as blogs, forums, and wikis, are becoming increasingly important resources. the future of the Web The survey revealed some very interesting trends in how the Web is evolving. Developers and designers are placing more emphasis on creating rich user interfaces, using AJAX and Flash. Standards compliance is a concern for the majority of web professionals. Finally, creating object oriented code, and working with languages that provide solid frameworks on which functionality can be developed rapidly—such as Ruby and ASP.NET—are on the horizon for most developers. The Web is clearly moving in a direction that is both improving the user experience and creating more efficient code. Copyright © 2006, SitePoint and Ektron. Purchase the full report today! 6
The State of Web Development 2006/2007 Tools of the trade hese questions dealt with the development environments that people use, and the server technologies they are developing for. We asked participants about both the technologies they use currently, and the technologies that they expect to start using over the next 12 months Dreamweaver remains the most-used development environment, with over 40% of respondents naming it as their primary environment On the server front, PHP is the technology of choice, with 67% of respondents saying that they develop for this platform. However, significant numbers of respondents expect to start using Ruby (24%)and Microsofts ASP. NET(22%)over the next 12 months. None of these statistics are overly surprising but, as we'll show in the next few pages, our analysis re vealed some sub-trends that may be less obvious Question 2: What is your primary development environment? As may have been expected, the responses to this question(shown in Figure 1)indicate that Dreamweaver is the most popular choice for building web pages, with over 40% of respondents indicating that it was their primary development environment. More surprising is that"text editor"was the second highest choice, at 30%! Figure 1. Breakdown of respondents' primary development environment 日 Other.1374% 2%% 日 Text Editor,3046% 63%日Dme404% 2% 445 ■ Dreamweaver aVisual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express 口 Zend studio aText Editor(Note Page, Ultra Edit, etc. 口 Other Copyright o 2006, Site Point and Ektron. Purchase the full report today!
The State of Web Development 2006/2007 Tools of the Trade These questions dealt with the development environments that people use, and the server technologies they are developing for. We asked participants about both the technologies they use currently, and the technologies that they expect to start using over the next 12 months. Dreamweaver remains the most-used development environment, with over 40% of respondents naming it as their primary environment. On the server front, PHP is the technology of choice, with 67% of respondents saying that they develop for this platform. However, significant numbers of respondents expect to start using Ruby (24%) and Microsoft’s ASP.NET (22%) over the next 12 months. None of these statistics are overly surprising but, as we’ll show in the next few pages, our analysis revealed some sub-trends that may be less obvious. Question 2: What is your primary development environment? As may have been expected, the responses to this question (shown in Figure 1) indicate that Dreamweaver is the most popular choice for building web pages, with over 40% of respondents indicating that it was their primary development environment. More surprising is that "text editor” was the second highest choice, at 30%! Figure 1. Breakdown of respondents’ primary development environment Copyright © 2006, SitePoint and Ektron. Purchase the full report today! 7