UPDATE: I setup a survey focused only on .NET development here.

Ajaxian, blog focused on everything related to Ajax development and JS libraries, last week announced a survey about the state of Ajax usage among developers and in the enterprise. The questions were simple:

1. Are you currently using Ajax?
2. Which programming language/web framework are you using Ajax in conjunction with?
3. Which Ajax toolkit, framework or JS library are you using?

Yesterday they published the results of the survey, which has been answered by 2618 people.

Before giving some thoughts on the data collected we just have to remember that the survey has been mainly advertised on the Ajaxian website so might be a bit biased toward the usage of Ajax and toward PHP/Java developers (46% the firsts, almost 30% the seconds).

Richard Monson-Haefel of the Burton Group, the one that set up the survey, also wrote some thoughts on the data.

Among the most used libraries are still Prototype and Script.aculo.us, which maintain the lead over the past three years, but more libraries are gained market share only the last year (jQuery and Ext JS).

It's interesting to notice that the 4 more used libraries are separated by less that 12 percentage points, which means that there is not a clear winner yet.

Another interesting thing to notice is that the usage of raw Ajax felt down from almost 40% of 2 years ago to just 13% of 2007.

But I wanted to analyze the data about what I care the most, which is the MS development world: only 14,6% of the people that answered the survey use ASP.NET. So I dove into the survey's results and worked to produce some stats.

Among the 381 ASP.NET developers that answered the survey the results are as follows:

What does this mean? That ASP.NET Ajax is the most used Ajax/JS library in ASP.NET development, but a considerable amount of these developers use also server agnostic JS libraries. Again, I just want to remember that this survey has been announced mainly on Ajaxian, so probably the users, even the ones that use ASP.NET, are leaning more toward the usage of pure JS libraries compared to the standard ASP.NET developers: which, in my opinion, means that probably among the majority of ASP.NET developers the usage of the MS ASP.NET Ajax framework is even higher. Also, 35% of these developers also used PHP and 14% used Java, so the figures above might include libraries they used in conjunction with those other server side frameworks.

I setup a survey on the state of Ajax only in the .NET space here.