2008 Web Directions Survey

This survey of web developers from the end of 2008 by Aussie-based Web Directions South gives an interesting snapshot of what people are using, somewhat bent towards what people are using in Australia and New Zealand.

Brief summary:

• Windows and Mac OS X are neck-in-neck on developers' machines. Very few use Linux.
• The greater bulk deploy to *nix than Windows, but some deploy to both *nix and IIS.
• Mysql dominates (70%) over SQL server (22%) and (then) Postgresql (10%) and Oracle (9%). I find Oracle's adoption here, almost as common as Postgresql, surprising for web apps for which it has never been ideally suited.
• On the server, PHP is definitely the most popular, with a good spread after that. However in frameworks, Ruby on Rails is most popular, closely followed by Python's Django. A larger number use something home-grown. A still-larger number use no framework.
• Most of us develop for standard-compliant browsers and then fix for IE. Most use basically the same, with Chrome starting to appear. Opera has well and truly lost.
• Relatively few are developing for mobile targets, but the iPhone is by far the most common of these targets.
• jQuery is winning by a very large margin. Prototype is second with less than half the number.
• No-one much has any interest in Silverlight!
• Microformats aren't having much impact. People are on-board with standards though, and even Flash is reducing share.