Happy First Birthday, Jackson the JSON processor!
Time sure flies when you are having fun: I just realized thatJackson JSON processor had its first birthday, if we use its 1.0 release's date (of May 9th, 2009) as the reference point.
And how far has Jackson community come? Here are some interesting statistics, mostly provided by good old Google Analytics:
- 10,000 monthly visits to Jackson wiki; with 33,000 page views (getting close to half million page views per year)
- 5,000 monthly visits to Jackson Javadocs; with 17,000 page views (200k on annual basis)
- close to 4,500 downloads (== visits toJackson Download page) -- meaning about 50k direct downloads on annual basis; and many more if access via Maven was included (wonder how could this be tracked)
It is fascinating how far and how fast Jackson has gone: currently its downloads beat Woodstox by factor of 4:1, for example, although Woodstox has been the leading high-performance Java XML parser for years now -- difference has to do with both declining popularity of XML (compared to JSON), and because Woodstox is more commonly bundled with frameworks, whereas Jackson is quite pleasant to use directly. Furthermore looking at trends, it looks like "Jackson traffic" has doubled or tripled over past 8 months or so.
Of course, traffic numbers are not quite as interesting as more applicable things -- number of users, and even more importantly, amount of functionality Jackson offers. But still, above numbers give some guidance as to growing popularity of Jackson, as well as of JSON as THE dominant data format on Java platform.
