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Nitobi ran a survey on Ajax technologies, and you (Ajaxian community) helped out in giving them your feedback.

They just released the results which consists of 570 answers. You must always take results with a grain of salt, since there are quite a few more designers and developers than 570 our there, but it is always fun to analyze. Often the results tell you more about the niche of people that the surveying group has access too than the global truth (e.g. the Ajaxian group skews to a slightly more advanced user base that doesn't mind getting dirty).

The responses that called out to me were:

Which development platforms are you using?

Java and PHP took the server side piece home (many said they were HTML/CSS front end folks). If you aggregate the Java technology (Java, JSP, Servlets, JSF) you get 394 versus PHPs 296, although it is hard to compare since you could choose "all that apply". I am willing to bet that if you are doing JSF now, you may well have done Servlets, JSP, and other!

Which development tools do you use?

Eclipse and Dreamweaver had the most votes here, with a large number of Notepad people (teasing?). Textmate was that low?

What causes you the most pain in designing and development websites?

• Browser compatibility: 303
• Testing: 114
• Javascript: 65
• CSS: 36
• Deployment: 34

Why do you choose to use Ajax?

• Improve user's experience: 276
• I want to build slicker applications: 38
• Easy to use: 29
• My boss wants it: 25
• Saves time: 13
• Saves money: 2

What toolkits or frameworks are you using in your projects?

This was quite a different result than from our last survey.

• jQuery: 144
• Prototype: 143
• Scriptaculous: 127
• YUI: 99
• Ajax for ASP.Net (Atlas): 91
• Mootools: 65
• Dojo: 63
• ExtJs: 61
• Nitobi: 61
• Spry: 29
• GWT: 19
• JMaki: 6
• Mochikit: 2

Here is the spreadsheet of the full results

Thanks to the Ajaxian community for getting in feedback so quickly on the third annual survey. Richard has written up his thoughts on the data, which we have to remember, accounts for a small percentage of developers, and those that visit Ajaxian are probably not the norm ;)

That being said, it is interesting to take a peak at the data (which is open for everyone to slice and dice), and Richard has some good thoughts:

What is interesting about the Ajax market is that it's more diversified in 2007 than it was in 2005 - the number of toolkits keep growing and jostling position in terms of usage. Right now there are 241 Ajax toolkits and related libraries listed in the survey. There were about three dozen in 2005 and 170 in 2006. The number of options is growing.

Prototype and Script.aculo.us are the only toolkits to maintain a lead over the past three years. However, over all there are no clear winners or losers as even the strongest incumbents (i.e., Prototype and Script.aculo.us) are starting too loose ground. Some frameworks initially popular have faded nearly completely out of the market (i.e., xajax and Rico ) while others have have sprung out of nowhere to become leading tookits (i.e., jQuery and Ext JS). The changes over the past three years are easy to see in the stack chart at the end of this blog, which shows the market share of the most popular toolkits - notice how they grow and shrink in market share. That means that the market remains immature.

What is astonishing is the nearly complete lack of commercial Ajax frameworks. Backbase has had a lot of success making a comeback after loosing some market share in 2006, but other commercial Ajax frameworks have not been so lucky.

We goofed in our recent survey story; we left out MooTools from the "Frameworks" category. While it wasn't an option in the original survey, over 11% of those surveyed wrote it in. If we'd actually included Moo as an option, it's likely to have scored even higher.

Many apologies for the gaffe; those responsible have been sacked, spat upon, flogged, and keel-hauled. We updated the PDF with this information as well as the number of respondents: 826.

The results of our second annual Ajaxian.com survey, prepared by Richard Monson-Hafael from the Burton Group, are in. And the winner is... Prototype, the most popular Ajax framework, by a considerable margin: 43% of you use it. Script.aculo.us is next, at 33%, confirming observations that many of made of the popularity of that duo.

The full results of our framework survey follow:

Note that multiple responses per participant were allowed; we've also thrown out any result with less than 3% of responses in the above graphic.

We also asked you about the server-side platform you're using. The big winner here was PHP, with 50% of you using it:

Some other interesting factoids:

• 25% of you eschew frameworks and work with XMLHttpRequest directly (wow!)
• 11% of you are using JSON to transfer data; unfortunately, we didn't ask enough questions to determine how this compares with XML or other data formats
• 3% of you are still using Microsoft's "classic" ASP framework; five of you (~0.6%) are using C++ (+2 points for increased performance, -100 for increased complexity?)
• 2% of you wrote in to say that you're using Adobe's Flex toolkit (hey, those banner ads are working out...); 2% also indicated that they use the Flex/Ajax bridge. Unfortunately, the survey software we used doesn't let us correlate these entries, so we can only say that 2%-4% of you are using Flex in some way
• One participant uses Delphi (how's that working out for you?), and another is using LISP (can we hire you?).

The survey results are based on 865 participants over the course of a week in September, 2006. The raw results are available.

UPDATED: Changed the wording of the Adobe Flex bullet above to be more accurate.

According to this recently released report from the Evans Data Corporation, more developers are using Ajax in the emerging markets than they are in North America.

The latest Emerging Markets Development Survey from Evans Data Corp reveals developers in Emerging Markets are embracing AJAX. Over 400 developers from Eastern Europe, Brazil, China, and India contributed to the study. Evans Data Corp found AJAX adoption is generally higher in the Emerging Markets then in North America. Brazil is breaking through the pack with 25% of developers using the technique. China has the lowest adoption rate with a little over 16%, closer to North American levels of AJAX adoption which are just below 18%.

They note that the emerging markets are just adopting it more aggressively than seen before with only an upward slope in the future. They also mention the adoption of other technologies, both web-related and not, such as PHP, Flash, Linux, and Windows.

You can find the full report here.