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20060810 Thursday August 10, 2006

How accurate are java.net's top project statistics? Yesterday, java.net updated their Top Ranked Projects page to reflect the top projects for July 2006. I've always thought these were fairly accurate. However, a couple of weeks ago, I did a bit of investigating (since GlassFish always seems to top all categories) and I found some interesting information. First of all, when last month's stats were first published, I noticed that DWR was on top of the "mailing list traffic" category. I did some investigating, and found the following: 

DWR: 62 + 522 + 1 + 3 + 1 = 589
AppFuse: 65 + 134 + 542 + 21 = 762

So I thought, am I missing something? Why does AppFuse rank lower. I posted a question to the java.net forums, and got the following response:

I have a typo in my spreadsheet where I ran the numbers. Let me recheck and fix.

Thanks to Helen for her honesty, but isn't this something that could easily be automated? This would eliminate any calculation errors? Especially since there seems to be issues with the previous month's statistics.

For June 2006 (excluding AppFuse's issues and cvs lists): 

GlassFish: 184 + 204 + 28 + 80 + 2 + 36 + 4 + 11 + 17 = 566
AppFuse: 684 + 19 = 703

AppFuse had more mailing list traffic, yet GlassFish is #1 and AppFuse is #3. Is java.net trying to make GlassFish look more popular than it is? Posted in Java at Aug 10 2006, 01:48:00 PM MDT 7 Comments

Comments:

ABSOLUTELY! Who uses Sun App Servers? What is their market share? I'll answer those questions. Nobody uses Sun's app servers and there market share is jack. Matt Raible, I think you've uncovered a conspiracy. Good work.

Posted by Erik Weibust on August 10, 2006 at 10:26 PM MDT #

Thanks for digging into this, Matt. I'll try to find out what was the error in the spreadsheet. I had once asked for absolute numbers so I could track growth, I'll see whether they are willing to give us that. The other reason why I wanted absolute numbers is because GlassFish is really a pretty large collection of projects, not just glassfish.dev.java.net, and I wanted to have a sense for the cumulative numbers. To Erik - Actually, quite a number of people are using either SJS AS 8.x or SJS AS 9.x (GlassFish) in any of multiple distributions. There were over 3M downloads last year and the latest surveys show a substantial jump in marketplace adoption.

Posted by Eduardo on August 11, 2006 at 07:45 AM MDT #

Downloads don't mean "being used in production". I spent 5 years in a shop here in Dallas with a massive commitment to NAS/iPlanet/SunOne/SJAS. I repeatedly tried to get people to look at/talk about the Sun servers and couldn't. Nobody, was using it or even wanted to talk about it. I don't know why, but that's just the facts.

Posted by Erik Weibust on August 11, 2006 at 08:49 AM MDT #

I actually wouldn't mind using glassfish in production (grizzly is the bomb), but have been waiting for them to opensource clustering support-- sounds like they will be soon.

Posted by Jacob on August 11, 2006 at 08:57 AM MDT #

Hi Erik. I agree, downloads != deployments. And I think that your observation was correct until last year, but I am seing a substantial change in attitude in this last year. Market data takes a bit to track actual changes, but look at the Recent Report from BZ Research where they indicate +19% use. I believe the reasons for the change include: improvements in the actual product, more focused grass-roots marketing, Java EE 5 support, and Open Source. - eduard/o

Posted by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart on August 11, 2006 at 10:05 PM MDT #

Hi Jacob. Yes, the sources for clustering went open source this week. The first build with those sources should be promoted next week as Milestone 1 of GF V2 (which will be distributed by Sun as SJS AS 9.1). And I agree, Grizzly rocks :-) - eduard/o

Posted by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart on August 11, 2006 at 10:08 PM MDT #

Hi Matt. I did a bit of stats gathering and wrote down some summaries here. Needs work, etc, etc, but thanks for encouraging me to start on it. - eduard/o

Posted by Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart on August 26, 2006 at 11:16 AM MDT #

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