First some insight into how my twisted mind works. I rarely believe any bar chart, pie-chart, percentage I see presented unless I can access the raw data myself and draw my own conclusions. I’m not a statistician by trade or education but I’ve spent a lot of time running surveys and analyzing large data sets; so I have the benefit of some experience.
Replay Solutions just published a survey about Java Platform usage. The questioning, subsequent analysis and presentation of the results was poor IMO. But they did one thing right – they provided the raw data. Thanks for that.
There’s a posting on TSS entitled “Why is JBoss at the bottom of this list ???”. In typical TSS style – few people actually bothered to read the survey results or question them and a long and rather pointless thread ensues. This post is an expansion of my comment at the end of the TSS thread.
The original report has this chart :
Update – Sunday 4/11/10
My initial (very quick) analysis was wrong. My formula for searching for different categories had a basic reg-ex flaw so I was over-counting JBoss by fair bit. I’ve fixed that mistake (spreadsheet here) and also removed duplicates (responses with both “JB + TC” and “Tomcat” or “JBoss” – I’d already admitted to this minor double counting (in the comments) – the original author’s analysis still includes this error.
So the ranking is now the same as the original author’s but the %’s are different. My apologies to IBM for originally stealing their #2 spot 😉 By the way – Red Hat fully supports both Tomcat and JBoss AS – so #1 and #3 rankings and being able to satisfy 87% of the market isn’t such a bad result for us.
[As percentages of respondents – that’s : Tomcat = 59%, Websphere = 39%, JBoss = 28%, Weblogic = 23%, Other = 19%]
These rankings (WAS above JBoss) are more representative of larger organizations (where both WAS and WLS have traditionally been stronger) – the latest Eclipse survey shows a similar break-out. Unlike the Eclipse survey – this survey doesn’t have any information on the respondents and they seem to be largely self-selected.
My original points still stand – poor questioning, poor analysis and presentation are common in these kinds of surveys. Always ask for the source data !
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