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Results From the 2006 Dev2Dev Reader Survey

by Jon Mountjoy
02/07/2007

Abstract

We ran the second Dev2Dev Reader Survey during the last two months of 2006. It went much better than the first survey, receiving more than 530 responses. Thank you for participating—we really do appreciate it. We hope that the winners enjoy their $250 Amazon certificates too!

This article summarizes those responses, and I provide a little interpretation of the results along the way.

A major reason for running the survey is that we want to better understand how we can improve Dev2Dev. In other words, we will use this feedback to help shape Dev2Dev for the future. Two issues cropped up a number of times in these results: newsgroups and Dev2Dev Live!. We're going to spend some time trying to fix these over the next six months or so, in time for the next survey. ;-) It's a little unclear what you, our audience, don't like about Dev2Dev Live! (I have a fair idea about the newsgroups). If you can shed some light on the issues, please send me an email.

A note about the results: Many questions were multiple choice. I've indicated this with (MC) after the question text. A few questions allowed free-text responses, and in these I've tried to highlight the major trends I saw in the responses. The responses have also been categorized into groups: Visiting Dev2Dev, The Overall Site and Content, Your Coding Environment, You and What You Do, and Tell the Editors.

Visiting Dev2Dev and Related Sites

Here is an exploration into how often you visit, how you go about visiting, and what you read when you do visit.

How often do you visit Dev2Dev?

Top responses: More than once a week (21%), More than once a month (20%), Irregularly (20%), Weekly (19%), Daily (10%)

Most of you are checking on Dev2Dev quite often, which is great. We publish new articles on Dev2Dev every week, and change the highlighted blogs and other material on the home page at least once per week too. With about 50% visiting at least once a week, I'm going to see if I can get more stuff on the home page that changes more regularly—perhaps posts from the forums, for example.

How do you access Dev2Dev content? (MC)

Top responses: Visit home page and browse (60%), Via feeds and blogs (10%), Via Dispatch (48%), Via search engine (28%)

The Dispatch figure went up from 20% to 48% this year. Either that indicates more of you like the new Dispatch format (shorter, easier to skim) or more of you liked the plea for survey participation in this year's Dispatch. :-)

I am still very surprised by the low number for "Via feeds and blogs." Our statistics show quite a large number of reads there—and for those who visit irregularly, feeds and blogs are a great way to ensure you don't miss out. (Or, just subscribe to the Editor's Blog, for example).

What content do you read on Dev2Dev? (MC)

Top responses: Articles (84%), Tutorials (64%), eDocs (56%), Blogs (38%), CodeShare Samples (39%). Also, Newsgroups (25%)

Good stuff! Our articles are receiving a healthy amount of attention, blogs continue to do well, and there's been a great uptake in our CodeShare. I think our newsgroups are an invaluable source of information too, and I notice a slight drop, from (42%). Is there a reason for this? Only 25% of you read our Dispatch newsletter.

I'm surprised by the low (23%) response to our webinars. If there's a reason why you don't like them, please let me know!

What is your primary purpose when visiting Dev2Dev?

Top responses: To look for interesting articles (36%), To find information when I have a problem (30%), To participate in articles/CodeShare/blogs (14%)

As expected, you're coming to learn and solve problems, which is what we hoped you'd be doing here. :-) Participation in our CodeShare/blogs is also up, which is great. We love to read your comments on our articles and blogs—please feel free to participate.

Interestingly only 2% of you visit Dev2Dev to download products. This isn't surprising as you probably have them already...

Indicate which of these products you use? (MC)

Top responses: WebLogic Server (72%), WebLogic Workshop (40%), Spring Framework (32%), JRockit (27%), WebLogic Portal (29%), Apache XMLBeans (24%), WebLogic Integration (18%), Apache Beehive (14%), AquaLogic Service Bus (11%)

This is to be expected: Most of you use BEA's products, and WebLogic Server is by far the most widely used technology. I'm quite excited to see the 11% for AquaLogic Service Bus as we only started that center last year. Spring continues to do well, and we opened up a Spring Resource Page in celebration.

Are you a member of Dev2Dev?

Top responses: Yes (86%), No (14%)

Glad to have you! Please make full use of your membership and participate on our blogs, articles, and wiki. You can also submit your own content.

Are you a member of CodeShare?

Top responses: Yes (15%), No (71%)

Membership is necessary only for those who want to contribute to projects. From other statistics it's obvious many more people use CodeShare, which is cool.

For the 15% of you who have never heard of it, pop over to CodeShare, our collaborative coding environment hosting code samples and code projects.

The Overall Site and Content

Now let's turn to your responses on questions concerning the site itself and the content we promote.

Please rank your favorite types of Dev2Dev content.

Response: Articles (50%/25%), Tutorials (39%, 32%), eDocs (37%, 30%), CodeShare Samples (26%/31%), Blogs (13%/28%), CodeShare Projects (16%, 28%), Newsgroups (14%/27%), Dev2Dev Live! (15%/23%)

The above figures represent both the "Favorite" and "Cool, but not favorite" percentage results in your ranking. (I've left out "Occasionally Cool," "Okay," and "Least Favorite.")

It's obvious Dev2Dev Live! needs some major mojo. Again, please tell me what you think can be improved here. Would it help if these were podcast instead?

The other figure are great. It's good to see CodeShare samples and blogs up there, while newsgroups could do with some improving, it seems.

What subject matters interest you the most?

Top responses: BEA specific (41%/39%), Programming tips and techniques (55%/34%), General Java EE (57%/31%), Specifications and APIs (28%/44%)

The above figures represent both the "Most interesting" and "Interesting" percentage results. Most of you were certainly interested in BEA-specific items, though a comparable number are looking for programming tips and general Java EE articles. We're certainly trying to hit all these areas, so this is good to see. For example, we have a large number of articles that don't target any particular application server. In terms of the less positive results, 28% found the specifications and APIs "Somewhat interesting" and "Least Interesting."

What features would you like to see added to Dev2Dev? (MC)

Top responses: A tutorial center (72%), Online books (80%), Open Source API Code Search (48%), Personalized information feeds (19%), Podcasting (17%)

Many of you would still like a tutorial center, so I'm working on this. I hope to integrate the tutorials on Dev2Dev with those in eDocs to see how it goes—a one-stop shop.

I'm intrigued by the open source API code search. If you have an opinion on what you'd like to see there, please drop me a line. What's wrong with Google's Code Search for example? What in particular do you want to see?

Among the free-text responses were several calls for better forum search, which I've passed along to that team.

Please rate the ease of use of the Dev2Dev site.

Top responses: Articles (50%, 45%), Overall site (47%/48%), eDocs (43%, 44%), Downloads (37%/47%), Product and Technology Centers (25%/52%), Blogs (19%, 52%), CodeShare Samples (26%, 46%), CodeShare Projects (20%, 45%)

These figures represent the "Great!" and "Just okay" responses, leaving out "Poor" and "I don't use it." So we're doing well for the overall site, articles, and our Dev Centers!

In terms of the negative responses, two significant ones stand out. Responses show that 11%/28% find Dev2Dev Live! "Poor"/"Don't use it." That seems to mirror the other statistics here. We find 31% don't use our user group events, 21% don't use our CodeShare projects, 16% don't use our CodeShare samples, and 21% don't use our blogs.

Please rate the quality of the content.

Top responses: Overall Site (49%/48%), Blogs (19%, 51%), CodeShare Samples (25%/49%), CodeShare Projects (19%, 48%), Dev2Dev live (20%,42%)

These figures represent the "Great!" and "Just okay" responses, and all is well. More interestingly, the highest responses for "Poor" were Newsgroups (15%) and, for "Don't Use," Dev2Dev Live!

Which of these activities do you attend? (MC)

Top responses: Conferences (55%), One-day developer events (54%), Local Java User Groups (37%), Local BEA User Groups (29%)

Lots of you are keen to get out there and attend events. Keep an eye out for the upcoming Dev2Dev Days one-day developer event series coming soon!

Your Coding Environment

Let's now look at how you code and what tools and libraries you use.

How many years of professional software development experience do you have?

Top responses: 9-15 years (29%), 2-5 years (23%), 6-8 years (22%), 16-or more (18%)

In the other responses, 7% had less than two years experience. It looks like the majority of our audience has had at least 2 years, and there is a mix of experienced and apprentice developers.

Which IDEs do you use? (MC)

Top responses: Eclipse (82%), Workshop Suite (51%), NetBeans (26%), None (15%)

Eclipse tops the poll by an overwhelming majority, as expected. The other results included IntelliJ (16%), JBuilder (16%), and JDeveloper (14%). NetBeans has seen the greatest increase from last year (from 17%). Okay, 15% of you are still coding with Emacs and VI! I'm not sure if you're pulling my leg or not. Then again, I think Java EE 5 lets you do that again. ;-) The free-text response had a couple of responses for Rational Application Developer too.

What Web framework(s) do you use most frequently? (MC)

Top responses: Struts (67%), Spring (47%), JavaServer Faces (36%), Struts 2 (26%)

No surprise there! There is a lot of Struts, Spring, and JavaServer Faces usage. Spring is up slightly from last year (where I unfortunately didn't have JSF). The other responses include NetUI (16%), Tapestry (5%), WebWork (9%), and RIFE (1%). One response in the free-text was ".Net :-( ."

What persistence frameworks do you use? (MC)

Top responses: JDBC (71%), EJB 2 (54%), Traditional Hibernate (41%), EJB 3 (24%), JPA/Kodo (10%)

Wow—71% still using traditional JDBC! I'd have hoped they would have moved to something like JPA, but I guess we all have legacy constraints. Hibernate is down somewhat from 57%. Perhaps the slack is being taken up by EJB 3/JPA (I'm glad to see the high EJB 3 uptake.)

What database server do you primarily use?

Top responses: Oracle (64%), MySQL (13%), Microsoft SQL Server (10%)

Oracle maintains its dominance here. MySQL has moved up a couple of points, as has Microsoft SQL Server. Other responses included IBM DB 2 (4%), Sybase (3%), and PostgreSQL (2%).

What technologies need more sample code and documentation? (Free Text)

There was a wild range of responses (over 300 too) to this free-text entry; almost every conceivable technology is listed. However, without a doubt EJB 3, Spring, SOA, and Hibernate received the most hits (in that order). EJB 3.0 interest is certainly on the increase, as shown in this question and the other free-text ones. We obviously need more than just the popular An Introduction to the Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (EJB 3) Specification article to satisfy this demand.

What technologies need more tools/plug-ins for building and/or automation of regular tasks? (Free Text)

The responses again were all over the map, but not as many this time: only 25. Nothing stood out at all, so I'll probably drop this question from future surveys.

You and What You Do

Time to learn about the audience demographic.

Which of these labels best describe you?

Top responses: Application Developers (45%), Application Architect (26%), Enterprise Architect (14%), IT Management (6%)

This confirms our belief that we have a number of architects here, as well as developers. We're going to be doing something about this too—a brand new Arch2Arch is going to launch in the next few months.

How many people work for your company?

Top responses: 2500+ (40%), 501-2500 (19%), 1-50 (19%)

It looks like the majority of you work for large corporations. The other responses were 101-500 (13%), 51-11 (9%).

If you were to predict, what Java technology will really make it big in the next 12 months?

The top response seems to be EJB 3 here, which mirrors the request for more documentation/samples too. Check out the WebLogic Server 10 Previews to start using this stuff. Other technologies frequently mentioned include: SOA, Spring, and Ajax. An honorable mention goes to BPM.

Tell the Editors

In this final question, we ask you to tell us anything you like—to get something off your chest.

Is there anything else you'd like to tell our editors?

Thank you very much for all the positive and "Great Job!" comments. We appreciate it. I'd like to personally thank all those who put a lot of effort into Dev2Dev during this past year: Sarah Kim, Jeremy Whitlock, Phil Nguyen, Kavindra Patel, Andrea Abernathy, Adam FitzGerald, Jill Steinberg, Linda Bronson, and Kirill Konrad. Here is a random selection from the 200 comments that you left. I filtered out most of the positive comments first, and left some responses of my own too:

search tool to search for content - display results by category or more intuitively The search function for the news groups is insanely poor

Okay, it looks like search and newsgroups are definitely on the agenda for this year then.

Thanks for keeping up the site live. I refer to this site to know about the technology trends. More on technology trend will help in guiding the members

Great, thanks. I'm hoping our blogs can start to fill this gap.

eDocs is great. I use it more than any other reference. Very clear and concise. Support and troubleshooting could be improved...including the newsgroups. Awkward in a way, plus you need more people monitoring and responding.

Okay, another newsgroup complaint.

There's only one annoyance I have with the newsgroups, and I've pointed this out before on at least one occasion: The way the newsgroups display is formatted, there is a huge amount of unnecessary white space on the left. If the display was formatted better, you could fit more vertical lines on the screen. It's annoying when note titles display in 3-4 lines.

And another.

I love BEA products and was using it since 2001-02. Started with using Weblogic 5.

:-)

Conduct more conferences.

We have an upcoming Dev2Dev Days world seminar series. I hope you manage to attend.

Dev2Dev is simply great.. best of breed contents..all what you need is there.. please keep it up ..my best wishes are always with dev2dev group

Thanks!

I want a more organized Dev2Dev website. Can be personalized. Add a chat session with the seniors/Dev2Dev team regularly so we can share among members. Add Dev2Dev regional country based community.

Great idea about regional country-based. We're thinking of adding personalized feeds too, which may help.

please notify us frequently about your new technologies and products

I've started to do this quite regularly now. Subscribe to my Editor's Blog for this.

Let's all move to open source. We can earn a healthy living by providing services instead of by hoarding our knowledge.

:-)

you guys are doing a good job for developers like me with the immense stream of material and ever lasting newsgroups to solve problems and a wonderful collection of resources pertaining to different product technologies.

Thanks.

There's a big gap between IT developers and business people, and most IT managers are not being able to connect the two separated worlds. Please help minimize this gap, teaching my developer teams that they use technology only to solve business situations (both problems and opportunities). Thanx!

I agree. So does Gam, who runs IT2IT.

You people always motivate me to learn new technologies with your articles. Keep continue it on latest technologies. Regards, Prakash

Thanks Prakash!

keep helping the needy!

lol

I think overall dev2dev has improved immensely since I started using it a few years back.

Cool.

You guys are slow on catching on web 2.0

I see we've had a couple of webinars on mashups this year. :-)

Not enough people contribute to helping with problems on the newsgroups..

Okay.

Love the one to one dev days in London. 10/10

I hope you'll attend the next one in a few months.

Great site, just never have the time to read it all!

:-)

The BEA newsgroups has a lot of interesting info ... but you need to improve the interface

Okay.

Much of the information on dev2dev is good, although sometimes I miss clear examples. But the biggest problem on dev2dev is the ability to really find the information you need. It happens to often to me I remember I have read something on dev2dev but I just can't locate it again.

Okay, I'll put this down to search and organization.

Excellent articles!

Cool.

News groups should be better organized and frequent question and their answers should go into something like a "professional" place where i can look for initially and then the general newsgroups.

Okay.

I'd love to get more contents on SIP development.

We published quite a bit near the tail end of 2006, with another on the SIP programming model coming up soon.

Please enhance the arch2arch area & continue to improve the amount of information available - more code example

Your wish will be granted. A big overhaul coming soon.

Jon Mountjoy worked as the editor-in-chief of Dev2Dev and Arch2Arch until April 2008.