Re: New Developer Survey Shows XQuery Adoption Skyroc

We definitely weren't expecting to find such a strong trend.
Remember too that this is not "we're using XQuery and not XSLT"
but simply a question of using XQuery or not. The majority of
Stylus Studio customers tend to have an XSLT background, so if
anything we thought it would be skewed even away from XQuery and
towards XSLT since Stylus Studio started out as an XSLT tool.

(BTW, if anyone is afraid of getting spammed for registering for
a copy of the survey results but wants a copy, you can ask me at
a home email address I set up just for this [1] and I will send a
copy directly to you.)

1. We emailed over 75,000 IT professionals, and also had the
   survey posted on our website.  We obtained email address from
   tradeshow lists, direct marketing lists, registered customers
   and our entire customer prospect list.  We did not as some
   have suggested ask just the XQuery SIG :).

3. Of the 550 people who submitted complete surveys, 477
   indicated that they currently use or plan to use XQuery this
   year.

4. This is a huge sample size...  to put things in perspective,
   last year, media news outlets were trying to determine the
   outcome of the US presidential election using smaller sample
   sizes.

As the survey results show - respondents turned out to be a very
well distributed sampling.  In terms of Job Titles, we got
everything from Student to CEO. Industry break-down was across
the board across two dozen vertical industries, and company size
was evenly distributed between small, medium, and large
companies.  Furthermore, our numbers are not too far off from
what a 2005 Evans Data study revealed - that 44% of developers
are already using or plan to use XQuery. [2]  Perhaps try
averaging the two survey findings if that suits you better.

In summary - while we encourage other vendors on this list to
conduct their own surveys, we stand behind our own survey results
- we believe that XQuery adoption is real.  And amazingly so,
since the standard is still a draft.

[1] survey1 (at) lavinio.net
[2] http://analysis.itmanagersjournal.com/analysis/05/01/31/2041211.shtml?tid=28&tid=112

Sincerely,
Tony Lavinio
Stylus Studio Principal Software Architect
http://www.stylusstudio.com/