Having concluded that an examination of the relative performance of programming languages on GitHub and StackOverflow yields interesting results, programming language frameworks are an obvious next step. Given the importance of frameworks in leading programming language adoption, understanding better the traction behind individual frameworks would be useful. With GitHub and StackOverflow representing obvious centers of gravity within the development world, they are clearly in a position to provide some insight into framework-related developer activity.

Before proceeding, a few caveats.

• Unlike with programming languages, the correlation between GitHub and StackOverflow activity with respect to programming language frameworks is very weak – .28 to be precise. Which means that good traction on one property correlates only weakly with similar activity on the other. In practical terms, then, it’s important not to read too much into these charts.
• By design, this analysis focuses only on those frameworks with a presence on GitHub. This obviously excludes frameworks such as ASP.net with no GitHub presence, and their omission should not be read as a comment on their popularity or lackthereof.
• Within the pool of frameworks with a GitHub presence, the following is an incomplete list. It was compiled in part from the frameworks that are most visible to RedMonk and in part on developer requests.
• The performance of frameworks on GitHub is influenced by whether the hosted project is official or a mirror. So bear in mind that the GitHub watcher count is particularly volatile.
• Some of these frameworks are micro- in nature, others strictly web. This is an apples to oranges comparison.
• In other words, the following is an unscientific examination of a narrow subset of total developer frameworks. No more than that, and no less.

With that said, here’s how the programming language framework charts work. As with our programming language rankings, StackOverflow’s tag volumes are used as the representative metric from that property. For each framework, the single most popular identified tag was used. For GitHub’s data, because there are no rankings available as with programming languages, the data here is based on the number of users “watching” a given project. This is used as a proxy for developer interest and engagement with a given framework. The sizing of the individual datapoints, meanwhile, is based on the total of GitHub watchers and StackOverflow tags for each project.

Using that process, we generate the following plot.


(Click for the full size chart)

Notable on this chart are the outperformance of jQuery and Bootstrap on StackOverflow and GitHub, respectively. Bootstrap’s performance is likely due in part to its GitHub native status, but jQuery’s overwhelming popularity on StackOverflow reflects its standing within a variety of JavaScript development communities. Ruby on Rails, meanwhile, has a relatively balanced performance, demonstrating traction on both GitHub and StackOverflow. Node.js for its part sees less traction on StackOverflow than Django, but is four times more visible on GitHub. All in all, however, the presence of these extreme or outlying values obscures the performance of less popular frameworks.

If we remove the five outperforming frameworks in Bootstrap, Django, jQuery, Node and Rails, we get the following plot.


(Click for the full size chart)

Within this subset, Spring’s strength on StackOverflow becomes apaprent, as do Flash and Sinatra’s popularity on GitHub. Play and Grails, meanwhile, show better than average traction on GitHub and StackOverflow, respectively. Beyond that, there’s little to differentiate Bottle, Dojo or Lift.

In terms of the data collected here, then, this is how the assessed frameworks rank in terms of their GitHub and StackOverflow counts:

1. jQuery
2. Rails
3. Django
4. Bootstrap
5. Node.js
6. Spring
7. Grails
8. Sinatra
9. Play
10. Flask
11. Dojo
12. Bottle
13. Lift

Again, because we are generally comparing apples to oranges, little should be read into the above list, as the frameworks all have varying goals and intended markets. It is, however, interesting to see how they compare in broad terms with one another. And in certain cases where projects are directly competitive, such as with Dojo and jQuery, the numbers may be more meaningful.

A growing number of the inquiries we field at RedMonk center around the need for quantitative guidance on technology uptake. Even with technologies on clear growth trajectories, developers, enterprises and vendors alike frequently want better, more detailed data on growth. How fast is it growing? What impact is this having on competitive projects or products? And so on.

Recently, the inquiry volume regarding decentralized or distributed version control technologies such as Git has spiked. Some organizations are considering migrations to such technologies, others have committed to the move but require data to justify their decisions internally.

Interested as we are in developer behaviors and usage trends, we recently examined the question of DVCS usage via Ohloh. Before proceeding, it’s necessary to note that the following analysis does not attempt to claim that Ohloh data is representative of the wider software development market. It is nothing more or less than an attempt to examine one specific dataset, and how it has changed over time. That said, given Ohloh’s focus on open source repositories, the case can be made that its data is likely to be more predictive than other mainstream sources might be.

In November of 2010, Ohloh was tracking 238,000 projects. Of these, the breakdown of code by version control system was as follows (all charts based on Ohloh data).

Notable on this chart are the overwhelming Subversion traction, the surprisingly robust performance of CVS (CVS was 24 years old in 2010) and the lesser but still visible usage of Git.

Two years later, a few things have changed. Here is Ohloh’s November 2012 data.

The two most obvious changes are the decline in CVS traction and the growth of Git. Git’s share, in particular, almost tripled in two years, while CVS declined by better than 50%. The fall off in Subversion usage was much less dramatic at -5.3%, but still visibile.

Here are the relative growth/decline numbers for all of the surveyed repostories between 2010 and 2012.

This chart makes two simple points evident. First, that each decentralized repository demonstrated growth while the two centralized systems declined. Second, that Git substantially outperformed both Bazaar and Mercurial from a growth perspective.

As obvious as it may be, however, that decentralized systems are growing and centralized declining, it is equally apparent that there is yet substantial room for growth. Here is the Centralized vs Decentralized split for the 2010 repository numbers.

A full 86% of Ohloh surveyed repositories were centralized in nature two years ago, although the majority of them as described above were at least on the more modern Subversion. The mentioned growth for DVCS projects is evident in the aggregated numbers for November 2012.

Clearly, DVCS – led by Git – has made substantial gains in overall usage. Nearly a third of all projects are now employing DVCS, versus 14% two years ago. And yet almost 70% of projects remain in centralized version control.

How you view this data likely depends on your perspective. Defenders of centralized version control can point to the still subtantial amount of code that is governed by systems like CVS or Subversion. Advocates of DVCS, meanwhile, can point to the growth trajectory of the platform, not to mention highly visible implementation like GitHub, recently valued at three quarters of a billion dollars. However one interprets the data, however, the clear winner over the past two years has been Git. Almost half of the total change over the past two years is Git alone. If you’re looking for bets, then, based on this slice of version control system usage, DVCS generally and Git specifically would be the most obvious.

Disclosure: Black Duck, the parent company of Ohloh, is a RedMonk customer. Black Duck was not consulted concerning this analysis, however.

“The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5 instead of native…We burnt two years.”
- Mark Zuckerberg, September 11, 2012

In the months leading up to the Monktobefest, we received around a half dozen offers to build a mobile application for the conference. The majority were the digital equivalent of cold calls, but a few were detailed proposals for real, rich multi-platform native applications with detailed capabilities.

We considered none of these offers.

Aside from the cost, which at least in one case was significant, my personal experience with native conference applications has been relatively poor. The applications have tended to be bloated, constantly updating and, not surprisingly for a one time app, bug-ridden.

More importantly, however, we already had an application for Monktoberfest, courtesy of our friends at Lanyrd.

While obviously at a disadvantage to native alternatives in some respects, our Lanyrd-based application had session schedules, venue information, maps and an attendee/speaker directory. And it could even be made available offline. It had, in other words, the majority of the features scheduled to be included in the native applications third parties wished to build for us. For the bargain price of free, then, we created and made available a mobile application compatible with, according to Lanyrd, “Android, Windows, iPhone, Blackberry (even really old ones), Kindle and Older devices via Opera Mini.” From the perspective of a conference organizer, this is an excellent deal, even without the other features Lanyrd offers in non-mobile settings.

There are, of course, many applications that cannot be currently satisified – or satisifed well – by HTML5 based technologies, and in such cases native or hybrid approaches are quite appropriate. But the dismissiveness towards web based mobile applications, fueled in part by Zuckerberg’s September comments, seems short-sighted. In an industry with little appreciation for either history or nuance, it is perhaps unsurprising that attitudes towards mobile/native tend to be so binary.

But it was once thought that webmail would never be a realistic threat to native email applications, and that the idea that enterprises would ever consume applications like CRM or ERP through a browser was folly. If time didn’t make fools of those convinced of those truths, it certainly exposed the truths as foolish.

If our experience is any guide, HTML5 is more capable today than is commonly realized. And it is likely to be more capable in future than anyone currently realizes.

When we decided, in the spite of the fact that it began as a joke, to create the first Monktoberfest, the most important question we had to answer was: why? Apart from incorporating craft beer into an event, why did a world with no shortage of conferences need another conference? How would we justify asking people to take time out of their schedule to be with us, not to mention travel up to us in Portland, Maine?

In the end, the reasoning was no different than that which created RedMonk, almost a decade ago. We wanted to build something different. A conference where we took the user experience very seriously. A conference populated by talks that would not be heard anywhere else. A conference full of smart, engaged people who were there by choice rather than geographical convenience. And a conference, of course, that converged the world of craft beer and the craft of software development.

Our attendees are ultimately the best judges of where and whether we have succeeded, but I am confident that for better or for worse, we have created in the Monktoberfest something very different.

Perhaps the best example of this is the two minute and thirty second video above featuring Sam Calagione, CEO of Dogfish Head Beer, talking to the Monktoberfest audience about how collaborating with your erstwhile competitors makes business sense. A lesson I wish the technology industry would absorb.

It’s notable not just because of the content, but because it didn’t come from us. Mike Maney, a longtime Friend of RedMonk, arranged and shot the video for the conference on his own. He and his colleague Matt Helmke turned their travel to the Monktoberfest into an epic 7 state roadtrip, featuring stops at craft breweries all the way from Delaware to Maine. From Riverhorse to Olde Burnside to Harpoon, they went from brewery to brewery, collecting stories and – thanks to some very gracious donations – beer.

How many conferences see attendees make that kind of an effort to make the event better, and more special? People like Mike Maney, then, are part of what makes the Monktoberfest different. A difference, we believe, that makes for a better conference.

Which is why reactions like the following are so gratifying.

@cloudspokes #monktoberfest was sheer #awesomeness – @jeffdonthemic was a perfect gentleman, as always

— Pat Patterson (@metadaddy) October 5, 2012

@monktoberfest is about people discussing better ways to make better software sans tech talk, disguised as an excuse to drink great beer

— Erik Dasque (@edasque) October 9, 2012

Just landed at DCA from #monktoberfestmy life somehow feels less awesome

— Christopher Petrilli (@petrillic) October 5, 2012

Coming back from Monktoberfest full I ideas about how to make life better for remotes and maybe everyone.

— Rafe (@rafeco) October 6, 2012

Trip to Maine for #Monktoberfest was awesome. Great work @sogrady! twitter.com/mraible/status…

— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 5, 2012

Had a fantastic time at #monktoberfest catching up with old friends, spinning up some business, and getting time to do real work. And: beer.

— cote (@cote) October 6, 2012

Home from Portland maine and Monktoberfest. It was my first, but definitely not my last!

— kellypuffs (@kellypuffs) October 5, 2012

great to meet everyone new + see everyone not new @ #monktoberfest – 2 days of solid quality

— Aneel (@aneel) October 5, 2012

Likewise, great chat w/ @andypiper.#monktoberfest draws the most interesting crowd.

— Joe Hildebrand (@hildjj) October 5, 2012

Reviews like these from Kelly Smith, Craig Cmehil or Alex King are, meanwhile, why we do the conference in the first place.

And just as rewarding as the knowledge that people enjoyed the experience is the understanding that they’ll be benefitting from it moving forward, via the new connections that are made between people, and by extension, the companies they work for.

Salesforce, meet Etsy. Alcatel, meet IBM. VMware, meet Cisco. Red Hat, meet Outercurve. And on and on.

Mistakes

Lest we make it sound like everything was perfect, rest assured that