Thanks to the Ajaxian community for getting in feedback so quickly on the third annual survey. Richard has written up his thoughts on the data, which we have to remember, accounts for a small percentage of developers, and those that visit Ajaxian are probably not the norm

That being said, it is interesting to take a peak at the data (which is open for everyone to slice and dice), and Richard has some good thoughts:

What is interesting about the Ajax market is that it’s more diversified in 2007 than it was in 2005 - the number of toolkits keep growing and jostling position in terms of usage. Right now there are 241 Ajax toolkits and related libraries listed in the survey. There were about three dozen in 2005 and 170 in 2006. The number of options is growing.

Prototype and Script.aculo.us are the only toolkits to maintain a lead over the past three years. However, over all there are no clear winners or losers as even the strongest incumbents (i.e., Prototype and Script.aculo.us) are starting too loose ground. Some frameworks initially popular have faded nearly completely out of the market (i.e., xajax and Rico ) while others have have sprung out of nowhere to become leading tookits (i.e., jQuery and Ext JS). The changes over the past three years are easy to see in the stack chart at the end of this blog, which shows the market share of the most popular toolkits - notice how they grow and shrink in market share. That means that the market remains immature.

What is astonishing is the nearly complete lack of commercial Ajax frameworks. Backbase has had a lot of success making a comeback after loosing some market share in 2006, but other commercial Ajax frameworks have not been so lucky.