The folks over at Web Directions are at it again.  They have just opened their State of the Web 2010 survey of professional web designers and developers.  The idea is to see what technologies and practices are being employed by web firms.  Although many "best practice" articles do exist around the net, they want to find out what developers actually use/do when creating new online presences.

I was able to participate in the 2008 survey, which shed light on what other web firms are doing.  A few interesting statistics from survey are:

• Less than 1% use Internet Explorer as their primary browser
• 38% were using Windows XP even though Vista was available (9% using Vista)
• Developers were primarily using Firefox 3, with an overwhelming 60% majority
• jQuery was the JavaScript library of choice, followed by Prototype and Mootools
• Apache/Linux web servers were being used 3x more often than IIS/Windows
• 12% of respondants were using ASP vs 17% ASP.NET vs 63% PHP
• 30% weren't using a backend framework like CakePHP, and 20% developed their own internal versions

You can read the full 2008 summary here.  I'm really interested in seeing how the responses will change after 2 years.  Some of my predictions (no scientific/statistic basis whatsoever) are that:

• Windows 7 usage will easily beat out XP and Vista combined
• jQuery will continue to be the top JS library, but with more users
• ASP usage will decrease to 5% or less
• Backend framework usage will increase at least 5%, and ASP.NET MVC will finally be on the map

I highly recommend that all web designers and developers take this survey.  Its great to see what other companies are using and how the trends change over time.  You can register for the 2010 survey by visiting this URL: http://surveys.webdirections.org/index.php?sid=69882 The survey will run until Feb 28th, so get your responses in soon!