2016-2017 Web Salary Survey

Tools, Languages, and Platforms

THE RAW TALLIES OF RESPONDENTS’ ANSWERS furnished a few interesting insights.

• MacOS is the most popular operating system, used by 64% of respondents, but Linux is also surprisingly popular at 57%. (Respondents obviously use multiple computers, because the shares of operating systems add up to much more than 100%.)

• Sublime is a surprising favorite for text editors, chosen by 42% of the respondents (although once again, totals added up to more than 100%.

• Express runs away with the prize for most popular Node framework. It was chosen by 26% of all survey respondents, whereas hapi, Koa, and Sails each got just 1% to 3%.

• Familiar JavaScript frameworks turned up as favorites, although Backbone came out further down the list:

  • jQuery: 67%

  • Angular: 37%

  • React: 23%

  • Backbone: 13%

  • Knockout: 6%

  • Ember: 4%

  • Polymer: 3%

  • Meteor: 2%

There was no such rush toward any PHP framework; nine different frameworks took less than 10% each of the respondents.

• SVG is the most popular graphics environment but is still relatively little used at 30%. D3 was even less popular, at 19%.

• Selenium, at 25%, is the most popular testing tool, as might be expected. However, there were other strong contenders:

  • Mocha: 20%

  • Karma: 19%

  • Protractor: 6%

  • QUnit: 5%

  • PHPUnit: 2%

• MySQL remains the dominant database behind the web, at 52%. MariaDB, at 9%, has failed to make great inroads among MySQL fans, at least on the web. PostgreSQL and SQL Server come ...