size of XQuery developer community

[paul agbetile]

I am not sure google trends at present is a good indicator of XQuery's
uptake as searches across all major programming languages has slumped over
the past 12 - 18 months. Personally I am more inclined to link this to the
current economic downturn. Perhaps as the economy improves and purse string
are loosen developers might take more of a chance in suggesting alternatives
to their heads of IT.

I have also noticed quite a few of my IT friends in varied companies seem to
have heard of XQuery even those in 2nd line support who don't develop but
have heard it thrown around the office but as Michael mentioned they tend to
develop their skills internally.

I can understand some of these fears /doubts must be realised more by those
who have been at the epicentre of XQuery specifications, development of
XQuery engines/databases (both commercial and non-commercial) as this has
been and continues to be a sizeable chunk of their lives.

I do think "the solution" is king however. If an established company knows
of a task perfectly suited to XQuery but sells a solution that throws COBOL
under the bonnet but will assume risk (which the client rarely wants) then
they are still a more resonant voice than the in-house developer with a
quirky taste for new things.

However I think it is still early days for XQuery, I now see common use of
XPath in many places I work and I think the word is just slowly starting to
filter through about XQuery.

In the meantime I suspect a silent many are beavering away at their tasks
with solutions based on fine efforts.

Regards,
Paul

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:45 AM, Michael Kay <http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk> wrote:

> >
> > Please help me with this. I honestly don't know the answer.
> >
> > How do you appreciate the size of the XQuery developers community ?
> > (thousands,
> > tens of thousands, millions !!??)
> >
>
> Over the lifetime of my XSLT reference book (nearly ten years), I think it
> has sold about 50,000 copies. If you assume one in 10 XSLT developers has
> bought a copy, that's half a million developers. Of course they aren't all
> writing XSLT all the time, some may have done one 4-week project and then
> moved on. And some people have bought more than one edition. But that's
> probably a better measure than downloads, because it's impossible to
> estimate repeat figures for downloads. A more conservative estimate might
> be
> 100K active developers. If we were serious about it we might define "active
> developers" as the number of people using XSLT in any one month.
>
> I would tend to share Ken's view that the number of XQuery users is
> probably
> about 20% of the XSLT figure. That's from a number of indicators:
> availability of books, traffic on mailing lists, traffic on Twitter,
> interest shown at conferences, etc. So that would give a figure of 20,000
> active developers.
>
> But it's very hard to tell. I don't even know how many developers there are
> in my largest XQuery customer (an investment bank). I would hazard 100, but
> I've no idea. These people are not typically very visible on the internet -
> programmers working for a bank tend not to be very outward-facing, with a
> few exceptions. And they develop their skills internally within the
> organisation.
>
> In the Google trends figures, I'm always struck how different the
> geographic
> spread is from anything that IT market size gives you. The market for Saxon
> is probably fairly similar to much other similar Western software: 40%
> North
> America, 50% Europe, 10% rest of world (that's direct sales only). Google's
> figures always show a much higher figure for Asian countries, and it would
> be nice to have an explanation. (There are probably Asian software products
> that we never get to hear about: the flow of information from West to East
> is much better than in the reverse direction.) The high figures for Czech
> Republic are also intriguing, given the size of the country. It would be
> nice to have SourceForge download figures broken down by geography, but I
> don't think they are published.
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
> http://twitter.com/michaelhkay
>
>
>
>
>
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