(and incidentally also World's 104th and 125th most popular OS package
it seems...)
Ok, so the first thing you are thinking after hearing this
press-stopping news must be: what the heck are you babbling about? Ok,
here it is: Open
Source Census (page 3). It is official now, all we need is Netcraft
confirming it (hey, can I get my geek badge back for this nerdy inside
joke?)
I think this site is interesting, as yet another tangent on how open
source "eco-system" (yes yes, it's a buzzword... but for once, fitting)
is evolving. Since there is quite a bit of data to play with, well, some
folks are playing with it. That's nice: data may not be groundbreaking,
but it is still at least mildly interesting. And something that just
would not exist for proprietary systems, not for free, and probably not
even for fee.
As to how it all works, I suspect the tool that scans machines to
produce submissions on which reports are based on correlates names of
found jar files with something like info from Maven repositories, or
perhaps OpenLogic's certified library database (description on the page
is somewhat vague and mostly non-technical -- which probably makes sense
I'm sure there are services being sold, as part of the whole
experience). Either way, I hope detection logic can be improved: as is,
there are no less (and perhaps more?) than 4 instances of Woodstox (part
of this is due to 2 alternate licenses, but naming change for jars
between versions 1 and 2 contributes to the problem).
Actual rankings are of course interesting to some degree. You can deduce
many things which are sort of obvious: for example, that there is lots
of inertia in software deployments (ancient versions being used), that
most people just deploy whatever defaults system come equipped with (why
else would anyone use, say, Stax reference implementation for
anything?), and that software stacks largely determine which other
libraries get used. Woodstox would not get even its humble 3% coverage
if it was not for stacks like XFire and Axis2 (and many other stacks
that do use it as their Stax implementation of choice).
It is also interesting to note that of other Open Source packages I have
worked with, the other one listed is Java
Uuid Generator. (with 1.3% prevalence, which while somewhat low is
still quite high considering it is not bundled with many stacks
[AFAIK]). And Jackson and StaxMate
should make it to the list in future. I especially hope that No Coder
Has To Suffer from Writing Pure Stax API Code. Ever. There is no need,
now that StaxMate works on all known good Stax implementations. And
Jackson: well, considering that it is more than 2x as fast as Woodstox
on parsing (when using equivalent document information), what is not to
like?
On that note, I better go and finish up StaxMate 1.3. It will be good.
You will like it, and will want to use it. Stay tuned!
