Open Source Frameworks Dominate Ajax

The folks at Ajaxian just published the results of their second annual survey of Ajax developers.

A number of interesting tidbits – first, the sheer dominance of Prototype, Scriptaculous, Dojo, and DWR as frameworks (after that you start to move into the long tail):


Most Popular Frameworks

From this, at least, it appears few folks are leveraging the commercial AJAX toolkits. (Of course, maybe those folks just don’t read Ajaxian?).

The platform usage graph is interesting too:

Most Popular Platforms

A full 50% listing PHP – but .NET does fairly well too. Atlas, the MS Framework for doing Ajax, only comes in at 4% of framework use, but .NET comes in at 16% of platform use.

They also note a full 25% of developers still say they are not using frameworks at all, and are working directly with the XMLHttpRequest object. While I can imagine a few edge scenarios where that makes sense, it seems absurdly high – are people really operating under the assumption they will individually create something better than these open source frameworks will?