Saturday, March 2, 2013

Some interesting statistics from the development community of ArcGis Web applications.


Over a period of 18 months I published two series of documents covering the creation of frameworks on top of ArcGis API libraries.  The purpose was to illustrate how the legacy Web ADF can be replaced by a framework on top of the ArcGis API’s. The first series covers the development of ArcGis Silverlight applications. The second series covers the development of HTML 5 applications using JavaScript. Both series can be found at my blog http://jpenet.blogspot.com
Over a period of 20 months I gathered statistics about the daily number of page views on the different documents. Due to the nature of the contents, most of the viewers are developers.  Below I show an overview of the statistics. A score is calculated based on the number of views and the number of days a document is online. A higher score shows the importance of topics as viewed by ESRI API developers.
The following trends I saw in these numbers:
  • There is more interest in doing development in JavaScript than Silverlight. The last 6 months I saw a rate of 90% JavaScript page views against 10% Silverlight views. This illustrate that the future lays in JavaScript development and that less applications in Silverlight and Flex will be developed. The fact that Silverlight is end of life and the scaled down development of flex is not strange to this direction of development.
  • Documents related to software architecture patterns scores very good for Silverlight. For JavaScript the use of the AMD pattern scores very well despite being one of the last documents created. The latter is also related to software patterns.
  • For JavaScript there is a huge interest in transformations of projections. The document is not purely development stuff, this could explain the high page views. Other more technical documents scores also good.

Creation Data Score Description
2011-07-25 1,47 USE OF PRISM AND MVVM IN ARCGIS SILVERLIGHT APPLICATIONS. PART I
2011-09-03 0,97 MAKE ARCGIS SILVERLIGHT CONTROLS  MVVM ENABLED - PART VI
2011-08-22 0,83 LOGIN PATTERN USING MVVM AND PRISM IN COMBINATION WITH MAPSERVICES PART V
2011-07-27 0,62 USE OF PRISM AND MVVM IN ARCGIS SILVERLIGHT APPLICATIONS. PART II
2011-12-04 0,45 STUDY : USING the ArcGis API for Microsoft Silverlight/WPF to create an ArcGis Database edit solution.
2012-01-17 0,39 SIMPLE EDIT COMMANDS AND TOOLS - PART VII
2011-08-02 0,26 CREATION OF COMMANDS AND TOOLS - PART III
2011-08-10 0,23 CREATION OF COMMANDS AND TOOLS ADVANCED - PART IV
Global average Silverlight API 0,65  
Creation Date Score Description
2012-08-07 2,19 Transformation between datum's in JavaScript – Part 1
2012-11-10 1,80 Using AMD pattern to create modular ArcGis JavaScript  Applications
2012-12-05 1,67 ARCGIS JavaScript API – ADVANCED EDITING TOOLS  PART VI – Part 1
2012-05-24 1,44 ARCGIS JavaScript API –Using Google Streetview with WMS
2012-07-04 1,24 Using different projections within ArcGis JavaScript Applications
2012-03-13 1,23 ARCGIS JavaScript API – BUILDING A LEGEND COMPONENT – PART II
2012-06-09 1,17 ARCGIS JavaScript API – BASIC EDITING COMMANDS  SECTION 2  – PART V
2012-05-09 1,17 ARCGIS JavaScript API – BASIC EDITING COMMANDS  SECTION 1  – PART V
2012-03-07 0,91 ARCGIS JavaScript API – CREATION OF AN APPLICATION FRAMEWORK – PART I.
2012-08-14 0,78 Transformation between datum’s in JavaScript – Part 2
2012-04-25 0,76 ARCGIS JavaScript API – USING BASIC GIS TOOLS AND COMMANDS  – PART IV
2012-03-26 0,47 ARCGIS JavaScript API – ADDING A LAYER SELECTION  – PART III
2012-07-22 0,42 ArcGis JavaScript API  and Google Places API
2012-02-17 0,40 BUILD  JAVASCRIPT APPLICATION FRAMEWORK WITH ARCGIS API
Global average JavaScript API 1,12