Continuous Integration adoption key trend in Eclipse Survey

The annual survey of the Eclipse Community shows that use of Continuous Integration tools, in the shape of the Hudson/Jenkins projects, is rapidly increasing. In 2010, 21.8% of surveyed developers used Hudson/Jenkins, but this year saw that number rise to 32.2%. A similar rise was seen in the use of Git or the hosted Git service GitHub, moving from 6.8% in 2010 to 12.8% in 2011, though Subversion still dominates the source code management category with 51.3% in 2011, down from 58.3% in 2010.

On developers' desktops, Linux lost most of the gains it made last year, falling from 33% in 2010 back to 28% in 2011. There was also a slip in Linux as a deployment platform with Linux dropping from 45% in 2010 to 41.8% in 2011, coming almost neck and neck with Windows at 41.5%.

There is a major caveat with this year's survey results though; participation was dramatically reduced, from 1696 completed surveys in 2010 to only 624 in 2011. The Foundation suggests that a lack of promotion in Germany and France by developer news sites, and the subsequent reduction in national visibility, is one of the reasons for this. They also noted a drop in the number of PHP developers responding.

Other results from the survey also gave debatable results. For example, less than 50% of respondents answered the question of which platform were they targeting for mobile applications, with 85% of those targeting Android; this result is unsurprising given that Eclipse is the IDE offered by Google for running their development tools. More surprising is that 66% were targeting Apple's iOS, which does not integrate with Eclipse.

Results regarding plans to deploy to cloud infrastructures were also notable, in that 52% of all respondents had no plans to use cloud infrastructure, while 8% deployed the majority of their applications to the cloud, 9% a minority of applications, 8.5% planned to in 6 months and 10% planned to in the next 6-18 months.

An executive summary of this year's survey is available, and the detailed survey results are available as an ODF spreadsheet (direct download).

(djwm)