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• #1 by me on 2/5/14 - 2:59 PM

  

  Interesting to see the Windows/Mac percentages for environment, it's probably the reverse of what you see at conferences.

• #2 by Denard Springle on 2/11/14 - 10:25 AM

  

  This is great data to have and confirms much of the information we'd asked for when folks sign up to be a part of Team CF Advance.
  
  A couple of things I'd like to mention - by comparison of last years data we can see that adoption of both ACF10 and Railo appear to be on the rise. This also reflects what we're seeing in our data - that the bulk of the developers who have signed up for the team are using Railo and/or ACF10, though ACF9 is still the current front-runner in CFML engines.
  
  For frameworks, there's also a strong correlation between the datasets - FW/1 and ColdBox are only slightly less known than FuseBox. Neither dataset really tells us which is more used, however - but at least knowledge of both ColdBox and FW/1 also appear to be on the rise, while other frameworks seem to be less known.
  
  jQuery and Bootstrap being clear winners is no surprise. In out case we asked people to rank themselves on their knowledge of javascript frameworks, html5, css3, etc. and the average CFML developer selected 3 or 4 out of 5. The fact that both these technologies were adopted early on by CFML developers also sheds light on why they are likely the most often used.
  
  MXUnit falling behind only 'none' in popularity of test frameworks is no surprise, though I suspect that next year we'll see that fall off in favor of TestBox, both as more developers learn the advantages of it and MXUnit continues to fade into obscurity. The really ominous number is the number of developers who answer 'none'. This says the community needs to do a better job teaching how to write tests in my opinion (something we're working on at TCFA).
  
  When I see 75% of people are using cfinclude's... I wonder if they mean in the spaghetti monster include inside of include inside of include way (which is 90% of the code I see), or if they mean in the 'I'm including this view in this layout' kind of way. With more an more use of the MVC frameworks I have to hope it's the latter, but I suspect it's the former based on my experience. This is another problem the community needs to address - how to re-teach folks how to write more easily maintainable code through the use of CFCs. I am pleased to see the majority of respondents are using CFCs... this bodes well for the community.
  
  The fact that 9% of respondents do not use source control is actually rather surprising. All things considered, SVN is still free and Git is free or cheap, so I'm personally confused why anyone would still not be using source control in their development. Even in the (all too common) single CFML developer environment - having historically significant versioning saves boatloads of time. I know it's only about 9-10%, but that's still pretty high for something that has so many advantages, no?
  
  Scrolling further down there are two questions which, I think, pretty much answer why some of my above observations about testing, overuse of cfinclude and lack of version control exist... 63.1% of respondents have never been to a user group meeting and 48% - nearly half - have never been to a development conference. <insert record scratch sound here>.
  
  I have to go on the record here and say that those who responded in the 'never' and 'none' categories of those two questions - you're missing out on a lot of knowledge, technology, networking, friendships and beer. The latter may not apply to all. :)
  
  Seriously, we need to get these folks into some user group meetings and to some conferences - get some learnin' done :)
  
  I haven't published the results of the TCFA sign-ups recently, and we've doubled in size since then so look for an updated blog post on this soon to help correlate with the data gathered here.
  
  Great job Michael... lot's of good questions I didn't think to ask in our sign-up form, so good to have these data points available and also nice to see the correlation between the datasets. Keep up the great work!

• #3 by Jim Priest on 2/19/14 - 10:28 AM

  

  Were the final results of this survey ever posted?

• #4 by Jim Priest on 2/19/14 - 10:32 AM

  

  Denard - when this survey was run in 2010/2011 (can't remember) the number of people not using source control was something like 20% so if we're at 9% now I'll take it :)
  
  Still no excuse not to use it though!