PHP n' CDT... Also, Germans. That's what I'm taking away from the recently released results of the Eclipse user survey. They're available online for all to see. I certainly never knew that Germany was the country in which the most Eclipse users reside. Or, at least, of those users that responded to the survey. Naturally, ya'll responded, right?
1,481 people took the survey; Not exactly a large enough pool to yield certainty, but a healthy helping, no doubt. Traipsing through the Survey Monkey results, we find some new trends and see the continuation of others. One of those long-running trends is the continuing proliferation of Web frameworks: Over 60% of the respondants said they used "other" Web frameworks. GWT, Flash and Dojo were the most popular, however, running neck and neck in the teens.
New trends showed around the PHP Developer Tools, PDT. It came in as a firm second as the most used language tool, next to JDT, of course. The C tool suite came in a close third, however. Also, Ubuntu was the second most popular operating system for both development and deployment. That was not what I was expecting at all, despite my admitted Ubuntu fan-boyishness. I fully expected more Mac users to represent, and I never expected all the other Linii (is that the plural of Linux?) to be so thouroughly outnumbered. Put Fedora, Debian and other Linux distributions together, and Ubuntu still came up as the leader on the desktop. Red Hat, however, is a strong contender for Ubuntu's throne on the deployment side. Of course, Microsoft still reigns supreme in both client and server-side OS wars.
Of course, what's an open-source survey without open-source comments? Here are my three favorite slips from their suggestion box, all (sic) of course:
- make eclipse go to a big diet, let
users uninstall also plugins from the base install (for example CVS I
don't use anymore) and remove obsolete features (i.e. XDoclet support)
or bloated ones like the WS Explorer, fix the update manager once for
all, so many iterations and it still sucks, both in UI and
functionality, a really bad advertisement for OSGi
- In my opinion Eclipse is great for Java
community but as a IDE it is to complex for doing simple tasks on task
oriented development process. Many plug-ins sounding great by there
name and/or description but the installation could fail and kill
complete update system until reset workspace and delete plug-in by
hand. Other plug-ins wont respect shared configurations and mostly they
wont work together with other IDE in the same project.
Our team has the rule that every team member can use there own
preferred IDE but if someone use Eclipse all other could run into
problems and this slows down productivity of complete team.
- Eclipse is seen by many as THE Java IDE. I sincerely hope that the Eclpse project can expand this reputation to other (object oriented/functional) programming languages such as Haskell, Scala, Eiffel, ...