A few months ago we launched the Griffon Artifact Portal, an online resource for locating plugins and archetypes. If you've visited the site in the past you may have noticed that each artifact has a download count. For example, at the time of writing this blog post swingx-builder was downloaded 629 times, making it the most popular download so far (code-coverage and miglayout are close on its heels).
These numbers are sweet as we can spot which plugins are more important to the community as a whole, however the site keeps track of a few more data points, for example the Griffon and Java versions used to download the artifact, as well as the operating system footprint (name, arch, version). These data points will help the Griffon team shape out the future of the platform.
Here are some interesting results since the site was launched up to this day:
Operating System
As reported by System.getProperty("os.name")
Interestingly development on Windows platforms is not as high as one would expect. The Linux datum may be related to the usage of CI environments (the fact that code-coverage is the 2nd most downloaded plugin could back this claim).
Processor Architecture
As reported by System.getProperty("os.arch")
More than 90% of developers run their apps on 64bit machines.
JDK
Grouped by major/minor
11 months since JDK7 was released and the desktop community hasn't picked it up in anger (or so it seems). The fact that official support for JDK7 was recently devealed by Oracle a few weeks ago (in the form of 7u4) should help in boosting this number.
Keep on Groovying!
