Ember.js Community Survey 2015

Over 900 participants answered questions in our un-official 2015 Ember.js Community Survey. Here are the results.

How long have you been using Ember? Ember's growth among developers remains steady. Over half of Ember developers self-identify as being very familiar with both JavaScript and with Ember itself (over 7 on a scale of 1-10). The vast majority (86%) live in North American or Europe, prefer Sublime or VIM (85%) and commit their code to a Git repository (93%).

The Tomster Goes to Work The vast majority (88%) of participants self-identified as a developer. 90% of participants used Ember at work. Most (77%) were on small teams of one to ten developers, although many (62%) claimed their entire development staff was one to ten individuals. This leaves over a third of Ember developers working for a company employing more than ten developers. 13% work for a company with over one hundred developers. 84% have an Ember application in production.

New Release Adoption During the survey window, Ember.js 1.10 was announced. By these numbers 75% of Ember developers are working with a very recent stable release (most recent or previous). 25% of developers still support a version previous to 1.7, released August 23rd 2014 (about 6 months prior to this survey). Most Ember applications move forward and adopt new versions of the framework. Especially when compared the adoption of Ember-Data versions, the story of sematic versioning and committing to API stability reads like a success. Ember-Data adoption tells a very different tale. 60% of users are on an older version of the library, only 45% on the most recent release. Ember-Data does not adhere to semantic versioning (yet), and the difficulty of upgrades is visible in this data.

Server-Side Nearly half of all respondents reported that Ruby is the primary language of their server-side stack, and a little over a fifth reported JavaScript-based backends. Together, Ruby and JavaScript account for over two-thirds of the server-side stacks in use by survey respondents. Server-Side Language preference follows a similar curve as the languages in use, but with JavaScript having the biggest difference between usage (22%) and preference (45%). Rails is, unsurprisingly, the most commonly used framework, with slightly over half of respondents reporting it as one of the server-side frameworks in use. Express, at 25%, is the second most-common reported framework. Ember allows for many potential server-side options, however, as borne out by the survey results: The third-most likely answer, at 14% of survey respondents, was "other", indicating a framework that wasn't included in any of the 11 enumerated choices.

Ember-CLI has quickly become the preferred build tool for Ember apps as 83% of respondents indicated using it to build their apps. This level of adoption is astounding, and speaks to the community's focus on and willingness to adopt new conventions.

Browser Requirements The number of developers supporting mobile platforms will continue to grow over the next year (56% to 67%), while the number supporting legacy platforms will continue to drop. The percentage of developers supporting IE8 (the last commonly supported browser without ES5, and for which Microsoft will drop support in January of 2016) is expected to drop from 15% today to 5% next year. Less than 1% of developers try to support IE6 or IE7. Microsoft's inability to launch an evergreen browser continues to be a burden on the development community. More developers support IE9 than legacy versions of evergreen browsers. It has been suggested that the Windows 10 browser, Spartan, will be an evergreen browser.

The Ember Ecosystem The addition of addons through Ember CLI has opened the door to extensibility, and nearly half of survey respondents report having authored at least one addon. Less that 20% of respondents, however, report publishing an addon publicly, indicating a high level of internal addon usage. The testing story for addons remains under-developed as less than 15% of respondents report implementing either unit or acceptance tests in their addons.