14 DAY TRIAL // 2011 is ending, and whilst normal people are preparing for Christmas and New Year's Eve, JavaScript developers answered a suite of questions for DailyJS.com regarding the general state of JS development.
Around 2800 professionals participated in this year's survey, and judging that DailyJS.com serves the most recent JavaScript industry news, tutorials and resources, you can imagine that the truly dedicated and talented mass of JS professionals had their say into this.
As normal, most JavaScript developers code for browser-based (client-side) environments, 98% as last year.
But this year as never before, server-side JavaScript development, the kind used to power the latest and coolest web and mobile apps, has seen a huge rise in adoption, being currently used by 45% of all respondents, growing 10% from last year.
This huge percentage can be explained by the wide adoption of Node.js as an interpreter, being currently used by 71% of all developers, compared to only 17% which use Mozilla's SpiderMonkey engine.
On the same level of success as Node.js is GitHub. Starting out a couple of years ago, you'd never think that it would be now so successful.
Developers use it more often these days to find JS projects or snippets of code (via GitHub Gist) than they do Google, Bing, Yahoo or Ask.
81% of all respondents answered they use GitHub as their primary tool for searching code, while only 51% used a search engine.
GitHub is also used by 9 out of 10 JavaScript developers to host their code. Second came Bitbucket with a measly 10%.
Don't be surprised. Many famous projects like jQuery, Node.js, Redis, Reddit, Ruby on Rails and many more, are currently using GitHub as their primary code hosting and distribution platform.
GitHub is so reliable that MooTools has been powering its plugins index for more than a year, and the jQuery Team recently announced a similar project to replace their lost plugin repository.
The rest of the survey goes a little deeper in other JavaScript development areas. You can check it out on DailyJS and compare it to last year's results.