does anyone know of a site showing market penetration comparisons
of server-side scripting technologies? I'm particularly looking
for the market shares of JSP, ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP, CGI, and
any others.
Thank you for any information.
Virtualy impossible!
Firstly serious sites do as much as possible to hide the detail of
thier sites, fequently making them appear as somthing else. For
example, if using php they may give the files asp extensions and tell
the php processor to process files with .asp extensions. In reality
most apparent 'clues' are not obligatory and may be reconfigured.
Secondly, it is very common to use multiple technologies. There is no
reason why multiple modules may not be activated in a server, and a
document may contain different scripts and xml tags which get
elaborated by different modules as it goes througth the works.
Usually this occurs on things like fully laden portal pages were
elements may come from different work groups, or where a particular
facility is not practical with the framework which is generally
preffered.
It is possible possible for dynamic content to serve up additional
dynamic content, providing you can control the evaluation order! More
commonly this will be server side modding client side script however.
Another approach to doing surveys is the marketing companies who
survey corporations, but of course they are surveying market sectors
in a manner that interests thier subscribers, which can be extremely
misleading if used casually. Certianly, vendors like to say they are
e.g. widely placed in the fortune 100, but that also means they could
well be very unsuitable tools for smaller outfits!
Next problem.....If you ask people what they use they are likely to
respond with the platform they have invested most in. Very often that
is NOT the system that is actually getting most of the work done, a
situation very widespread in the IT industry as a whole!
You could look at "activity". For example, newsgroup activity can
indicate that a solution is in widespread use, but penalises solutions
which are easier to use and deply. Support sites and eZines are often
taken as an indicator as to the popularity of a solution.
Unfortunately most major vendors know this and have followed
Microsofts lead in spending a significant part od thier R&D budgets in
"evangelism", aka spin that is primarily orientated towards generating
large quantities of articles and material in trade mags and eZines.
Just to throw a last spanner into the works, there is a lot of "Open"
stuff out there that is not commercially "marketed" or promoted and
yet they are often market leaders, such as Apache.
Oh, and another note......how do you judge market penetration? Number
of servers? That means the Littleville Gardening club server on a
domestic ADSL line with an enthusiastic student web smith counts the
same as a Google front end. What about domains? In terms of volume the
bulk of domains live on domain hosting servers which althogth offering
active servises hardly ever actually use, and the individual domains
probably only get a few hits each week. It has long been noted that
99% of internet traffic travels througth 1% of the domains!
So, lets be more sophisticated, lets make a rating based on server
traffic? OK, that could be valid for comparing the routers, and maybe
the web server, but not so much for dynamic page generation. Archive
and download sites have large traffic but the server side scripting
tends to be limited to a few menial tasks such as logins and site
searches, a far cry from top-noth eCommerce sites such as Amazon where
scripts are analysing you and making suggestions evry inch of the way.
Last resort. What about counting the number of server side instruction
executed. Thatt's a good technique, but nobody is counting them. And
thank goodness, if code counters became the metric then we would be
lamblasted with spin telling us that splitting complex instructions
into several smaller ones makes our code more robust, and the code
generation wizards in commercial products would take the concept of
bloatware into new realms!
So....ahem..... there s no answer!
But what is your REAL question? Why do you want to know?
Maybe there is an answer for that;-)
