ADF EMG New Member 2013 Survey Results

[Chris Muir]

I'd like to announce the availability of the ADF EMG new member survey results for 2013.  As usual this survey provides insight into what's happening with ADF in the wild.  A large thank you must go to Simon Haslam and Jean-Marc Desvaux who cover signing up the new members.  Their volunteer efforts are what makes this report possible.

The 2013 results represent 315 replies, and can be found with previous years via the following links:

2013 - http://bit.ly/adfemg2013survey

2012 - http://bit.ly/adfemg2012survey

2011 - http://bit.ly/adfemg2011survey

<2011 - under the "ADF EMG Surveys" heading: http://bit.ly/wdy3ik

(Here's last year's discussion on the 2012 results: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/adf-methodology/eXuQgbHK-mE/_pKeURk5YckJ)

This year sees a dip in new membership growth, about a quarter.  But to be honest this year personally I've been focusing on building the ADF Google+ community and promoting the EMG has been a secondary exercise.  The G+ group has shown crazy growth, obtaining ~1050 members in around 6 months, something that took the EMG several years to achieve.  Whether you like Google+ or not, for the ADF community at large it has been a successful endeavour providing yet another place to talk to your peers.

The EMG remains the place to discuss ADF best practices, design, architecture and more and this is reflected in the survey results.

As a reminder, the survey report represents *new*members* and as a result will have a bias to ADF developers who are just picking up JDeveloper and ADF.  If we can ever convince the entire memberbase to fill out a survey, the results would change somewhat to show more established ADF developments, potentially many in maintenance mode too.

Anyway, enough setting the scene.  What can we learn from the survey this year that's different from the last?

* Mobile has arrived - spread throughout the answers is references to ADF Mobile.  While it's not the group's primary focus, obviously people are joining to learn more about ADF in general thanks to ADF Mobile.

* Question 8 was new for 2013, we introduced it to find out what collateral customers are actually using or know about to help them with their ADF learning and development.  Significant statistics in this questions are the answers that ranked poorly, specifically conferences and user group sessions.  At first glance you could therefore discount these efforts & ask why do we bother presenting at conferences at all?  But from my perspective all the best speakers, book writers, OTN forum posters have all come out of the conference circuit.  So arguably conferences are your ADF talent incubator.

* Question 15 was new for 2013, asking questions around do you know about, are you using, are you satisfied with, peripheral ADF products.  I must admit I messed this question up a little, and the "Using" column should not have existed.  You were either using and satisfied, or using and unsatisfied.

However picking through the results, we can see ~40% of the new members are looking to pick up ADF Mobile, ~26% plan to use ADF Essentials, ~27% already are, the skin editor also proves popular for future growth and current use.

* A lot of the other results are really the same as 2012.  Forms programmers are a dying bread, WLS remains the most common application server, web services are becoming more popular as a persistence layer after ADF BC.

Finally as usual my "Uncle Larry Loves You and Grants an ADF Wish" question gets lots of good answers.  Take time to read through them, too many answers too mention here.

That's my little look over the survey results.  Is there anything you find significant you'd like to discuss with the group?

Regards,

Chris Muir

ADF EMG Group Moderator & Oracle ADF Product Management

[Grant Ronald]

Thanks Chris, an interesting read

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Grant Ronald
Director of Product Management
Oracle Application Development Tools
Author: The Quick Start Guide to Fusion Development: JDeveloper and Oracle ADF.