Two days ago, I put up a simple survey that asked what essential tools, libs and frameworks you were using for front-end development. I closed out the survey last night a little before 9pm EST and after getting 1000+ responses. I now want to share the results.

Why Am I Doing This?

As I’ve mentioned, this was an incredibly unscientific survey and not meant to determine which tool is best. Just which tools seem to be in heavy use.

I’m doing this to help web developers (myself included) stay on top of commonly used tools. Since change constantly but at least this gives a snapshot of what’s frequently used.

A couple of people buzzed me (some complaining and eluding bias), because I hadn’t listed “x” tool or lib in the survey. The survey wasn’t meant to be all-inclusive and if you look at the “Other” section below, you’ll see how adding everyone’s favorite tool would’ve been impossible. That’s what the “Other” option was for. Ultimately, instead of looking at what wasn’t there, you should read this for what was selected to determine if you need to get up-to-speed on specific tools.

The Process

After closing the survey, I removed all blank records and then went entry by entry to factor in the “Other” submissions and list out tools not originally added on the survey. I did my best to list every technology mentioned although it’s quite possible I may have missed something. If I did, it was purely accidental.

I ended up with 1031 total responses that I felt were good submissions. The results shown below for the main list was based off of what Google Docs provided. I didn’t do those calculations but I have to assume they’re correct.

Important to note is that the following options were added after 218 people had already replied so those values could’ve been much higher if added at the beginning. This is evident in Git & Coffeescript’s high numbers despite being added late.

LESS

Git

ExtJS

Ember.js

prefix-free

JSBin

JSFiddle

dabblet

Kendo UI

Wijmo

Coffeescript

YUI

Results from the Main List

Results from the “Other” Submissions

The ones listed below were submitted via the “Other” option and not on the main list.

A note about Enyo

EnyoJS is a framework released by HP which looks to have come out of the great work done by Palm. I haven’t used it and don’t have an opinion whether it’s actually awesome or not. I’ve held off on including it in these stats, though, because there was a high number of out-of-place submissions for it and they seemed clustered together around the same time. Additionally, MANY were single Enyo submissions with no other option chosen. Just seemed too odd to me but I’ll put out the data and if someone else wants to publish, go for it.

The Raw Data

Here’s the raw data from the survey. Please feel free to use it as you like and I hope it helps you out.

Raw Data from the Survey (.csv)