Sungmoon's Weblog

To learn more about what JavaFX developers want, Sun's product management team did a survey for JavaFX developers. The survey was open for about four weeks (9/26 ~ 10/20). As of 10/20/09, 2056 people started the survey and 1,238 (60%) finished to the end. Out of total respondents, 1,614 people came through blogs and sun’s web pages, and 442 people came through email leads. We cannot fully disclose the result here, but we still would like to share some of them.

Some highlights are:

• 457 (22%) out of 2056 people said that they would like to participate in JavaFX advisory panel and provide more feedback to us.
• Most number of people (23.8%) responded from United States, followed by India (6.47%), Germany (6.37%), UK (5.2%), Russia (4.43%), Brazil (3.36%), France (2.68%), China (2.53%), and Canada (2.43%).
• Among those who tried JavaFX, 56% were developing enterprise applications. Utilities, productivity, games were also among popular genres.
• Among mobile platforms, Java ME, Android, and iPhone are most popular
• 91% of the people who tried JavaFX are spending most of their time writing codes
• People use NetBeans, Eclipse, Photoshop the most. Many also used GIMP and Inkscape
• In the next release, people would like to see more UI controls and better tools.
• Those who tried JavaFX are more likely to use JavaFX in the future projects

Where Did They Take The Survey?

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The following Google Map shows where people are located. Note that the dots are aggregated. It does not show how many people are in one dot.

Target Device

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The next question asks what are the platforms they are targeting.

This is a multiple-choice question. 87% of the people are targeting desktop, and as much as 68% are targeting web environment. One third of them were also targeting mobile platform. However, only 3% (13 people) were considering TV as their development platform.

By further analysis, I found that 38% are targeting only one platform, 35% are targeting two platforms, and 23% are targeting three platforms. 2% were targeting five platforms. In all, 63% are targeting two or more platforms.

Target Mobile Platform

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JavaME is the #1 target platform (54.6%) for mobile. But it is important to note that Android and iPhone are also major target platform for them. Very little people target Brew or Flash Lite.

Tools That People Use

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Out of all the people who responded, 75.5% use NetBeans regularly. 54.5% of them use Eclipse regularly. Some of them also work on creating content structure or layout with Dreamweaver. Many people also used Photoshop or Illustrator quite often. Visual Studio .NET or Dreamweaver was less popular. This question is only for who used JavaFX, so the result does not represent the whole group. 26% of the people chose “Other tools”. This means that there is a wide variety of tools that are used by RIA developers. Among those, Gimp (open source graphic editor) was most frequently cited, and many also mentioned Inkscape, IntelliJ, and Idea. Other people mentioned JDeveloper or JBuilder. See the picture below.

What Do People Want For The Future Release of JavaFX

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People want more UI controls and better tools support.

What Do Developers Want From JavaFX?

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How Do You Want To Learn JavaFX?

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What do people want to see more to learn JavaFX? The answer was very simple. People want more tutorials, examples, samples, applications, and articles to learn JavaFX better.

Other Comments?

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430 people have posted additional comments. Most frequently quoted words are Swing, UI, components, Linux, Performance, Tools, Mobile, and applications.