Ryan De Laplante NetBeans Usage Statistics Will Surprise You
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# Country Count Ratio 1. United States 373,252 16.1% 2. Brazil 204,470 8.8% 3. India 142,460 6.1% 4. Germany 120,482 5.2% 5. China 117,489 5.1% 6. Mexico 88,320 3.8% 7. United Kingdom 79,847 3.4% 8. Spain 78,408 3.4% 9. Italy 65,798 2.8% 10. France 59,191 2.5% 11. Poland 57,076 2.5% 12. Canada 49,666 2.1% 13. Colombia 42,970 1.8% 14. Japan 40,883 1.8% 15. Peru 37,230 1.6% 16. Czech Republic 32,763 1.4% 17. Russian Federation 29,765 1.3% 18. Australia 27,992 1.2% 19. Thailand 27,975 1.2% 20. Netherlands 24,551 1.1%
(source: NetBeans DreamTeam mailing list Sep 9 2008)
I remember Sun proudly announcing that there are over 300,000 active NetBeans users at JavaOne 2007. Since then versions 6.0 and 6.1 were released, and obviously the user base has grown significantly. I recently discovered that a senior developer I know who works for a major bank is using NetBeans 6.1. He is a recent Eclipse convert and really really loves NetBeans.
It's time for all of you commercial and open source plugin developers to target the massive and ever expanding NetBeans IDE user base. Sometimes I find a great IDE plugin that is only available for Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA. There is a market for NetBeans plugins.
I see Canada has quite a few NetBeans users. If you are in the Toronto or GTA area and use NetBeans I'd love to hear from you!
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
Comments
Varun Nischal replied on Wed, 2008/09/24 - 4:58am
Geertjan Wielenga replied on Wed, 2008/09/24 - 5:10am
Varun Nischal replied on Wed, 2008/09/24 - 5:28am
in response to: geertjan
[quote=geertjan]Do that about 70,000 times and then you'll be beating Brazil![/quote]
Lol :D I guess this might be easier than beating Brazil in Soccer ;-)
Casper Bang replied on Wed, 2008/09/24 - 10:04am
Not to take anything away from this achievment, but these numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt no?
Unlike is the case with an IDE such as JDeveloper which requires a user account, it is not possible for the NetBeans portals to recognize a unique user. And I suspect I am not the only one running multiple NetBeans versions, from within multiple OSs, on multiple computers. So I would account for at least 10 "users".
Meera Subbarao replied on Wed, 2008/09/24 - 10:06am
Tom Wheeler replied on Wed, 2008/09/24 - 10:59am
Jens Eckels replied on Wed, 2008/09/24 - 11:28am
so if it phones home weekly and i have 8 different netbeans configs running between work and home, does that mean i would register individually as 416 on this list (52x8)?
if so, i am unsure that these numbers can be relied upon for any accuracy.
the community has grown, yes. but i don't know what these numbers can actually tell us.
clarification?
Jeff Prestes replied on Wed, 2008/09/24 - 3:07pm
in response to: geertjan
Geertjan, Maybe the numbers aren't correct but anyway I think this number shows the importance of our Brazilian NetBeans Translation Community.
We translate NB to portuguese since 5 version and NB newsletter as well. This help newest Java programmers to use NetBeans and motivate anothers to use.
Jeff Prestes replied on Wed, 2008/09/24 - 3:11pm
Maybe the numbers aren't correct but, anyway, I think this number shows the importance of NetBeans Translation Community.
Brazilian community translate NB to portuguese since version 5 and NB weekely newsletter as well. This help newest Java programmers to use NetBeans and motivate anothers to use.
There're a lot of developers working on NB translation. I guess this have helped Brazil arrive at 2nd place.
Jose Maria Arranz replied on Thu, 2008/09/25 - 4:24am
Umm Mexico and Spain are well positioned. Some influence is that at javahispano.org some active members are NetBeans advocates too, for instance our famous NetBeans dream team member Ibon Urrutia :)
Henrique Meira replied on Thu, 2008/09/25 - 8:36pm
as a friend say: BRASIL ROCKS!!!
This number is absolutely correct! We guarantee. ;-)
But it don't matter... What really matter is the constant growing number of NetBeans users around the World. It's amazing!
As I read at somewhere: the only IDE you need.
Alessandro Borges replied on Tue, 2008/09/30 - 1:08pm
Legal !!!
Brazil has a pretty good position.
I think the NB translation to Brazilian Portuguese helps a lot the newbies.
And so above numbers.
Tim Boudreau replied on Tue, 2008/09/30 - 6:03pm
in response to: cbang
There is a unique ID - IIRC it's a random long, generated on first start and saved in the user settings dir. No registration or personal info going over the wire. So, it's not perfect (that *would* require registration), and multiple copies of NetBeans would show up as multiple users (but AFAIK that chart only tracks UIDs from releases of NetBeans, not development builds). It might be that if you choose to import settings from a previous version when you install a new version, the uid is preserved.
Actually, a lot of effort goes into making sure those numbers are as good and as accurate as possible - and keeping them conservative (for example, it doesn't count anyone behind a firewall that doesn't let autoupdate traffic through - this is true of many developers in India and China). These numbers are one of the things that justifies Sun continuing to pay us to work on NetBeans :-)
After all the time I've spent in Brazil (about four months out of the last three years) giving talks about NetBeans, plugin development and general Java development, I'm very happy to see Brazil coming in #2 here! There are some great programmers there.
-Tim