Jenkins popular not only with Java developers

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) operator CloudBees has released the results of a survey that was conducted last October among the users of the Jenkins continuous integration system. Jenkins was forked from Hudson after Hudson creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi left Oracle in 2010; the developer now works for CloudBees.

A notable result, apart from the fact that the majority (87%) of the more than 700 participating Jenkins users are satisfied with the technology, is that the system that originated in the Java community now also plays a supporting role in C/C++, JavaScript, Python and C# development. 74% of the participating Jenkins users said that they are Java developers, but 38% are (also) C/C++ programmers. JavaScript came in at 35%, while Python and C# achieved 29% and 25%. Other programming languages such as PHP, Groovy and Ruby achieved well over 10%.

The survey found that, although Jenkins is suitable for businesses of any size, it is mainly used in companies with more than 10 developers (77%). Jenkins is only rarely used in larger companies with more than 500 developers; 6% of users said that they work in a company of that size. No less than 11% of survey participants replied that they have written a plugin for Jenkins, which points towards an active community.

The system's increasing popularity is also evident from the rising number of installations. The number of Jenkins installations increased by 66% to just over 53,000 installations within a year. 160 new plugins were created in the same time; the total number of plugins at the time of the survey was 636.

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