The Fastest Growing Web Framework Is...

Hightower made an interesting observation in his blog recently when he compared job growth rates of various Web framework technologies on www.indeed.com. The clearly undisputed winner? JSF. As you can see from the attached graph images, JSF is growing much faster than any other other listed frameworks, as well as having far more job opportunities. But is it really? Is this graph telling the whole truth? More on that later.

Also very interesting, is the Spring and Ruby on Rails plots. It seems, at least according to this job site. That Ruby on Rails and Spring are virtually neck and neck, vying with each other for which one is more popular. At various times, Ruby on Rails has been more popular than Spring, but then Spring has overtaken Ruby on Rails and become more popular again.

This one I have a few problems with, since I don't see the supporting data on other job sites for it. For example, dice.com currently lists 2114 job openings for Spring, but only 241 for Ruby on Rails. That seems to differ radically from what the data at indeed.com suggests.

Of course, the sad story in all this, is the frameworks that just don't seem to be going anywhere at all. Tapestry, despite being a strong competitor to JSF, has gone virtually no where. once it is experienced its initial growth spurt after being released. It's basically flat. Unlike the Ruby on Rails vs. Spring data, the data at dice.com seems to support this one. There are currently only 87 jobs listed for Tapestry. This part is hard to debate no matter how you spin the numbers. Tapestry is virtually flat as far as having any kind of growth.

The data for WebWork and Struts2 is just as disappointing. Neither one of them has gained any traction at all. And once again, the dice.com data seems to support this.

To be fair, Struts2 was only released in February of this year, so it hasn't had a whole lot of time to gain in popularity. But since Struts2 is based on WebWork, I feel that it is fair to combine the WebWork and Struts2 graph lines. If we do this, we still find that neither one has experienced any significant growth.

Wicket was not included in this graph, but a quick dice.com search for Wicket shows only 23 openings, bringing it in no better than WebWork or Struts2.

What does this say about the future of Java Web frameworks? Is JSF going to usurp all of them and become "The Java Web framework?" Is JSF clearly the "current hot skill to have?"