Self flattering statistics

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Vadim Zeitlin

After receiving the latest monthly Source Forge newsletter with their list of top 25 projects I became curious because at first glance it had seemed like most of them were Web-based applications and I wondered if it really was so. So I spent 10 minutes clicking on all the 25 links and quickly looking at the programming languages, environments, and frameworks these projects used, and here is what I found (please bear in mind that I could easily make some errors, all this is very quick and rough):

http://www.phpmyadmin.net/: Web/PHP
http://adempiere.sourceforge.net/: Java
http://www.zkoss.org/: Java
http://arianne.sf.net/: Java
http://www.finkproject.org/: Perl(?)
http://portableapps.com/: Python
http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/: C++/wx (and Qt?)
http://jmri.sourceforge.net/: Java
http://www.net-snmp.org/: C
http://www.scummvm.org/: C++
http://www.taskcoach.org/: Python/wx
http://www.xoops.org/: Web/PHP
http://squirrelmail.org/: Web/PHP
http://postbooks.sourceforge.net/: C++/Qt
http://www.openbravo.com/: Java
http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/: C
http://www.freedos.org/: C
http://pwsafe.org/: C++/wx
http://getgreenshot.org/: C#
http://www.omegat.org/: Java
http://tuxpaint.org/: C/SDL
http://www.dvdstyler.org/: C++/wx
http://keepass.info/: C++/MFC
http://www.dvtk.org/: C++ (?)
http://www.scintilla.org/: C++

As you can see, actually my initial impression was totally wrong and there are only 3 web-based applications (incidentally, all written in PHP) whereas there are twice as many written in Java. What really surprised me, however, was that 4 of them used wxWidgets (although I’m not sure if it’s the main UI used by MediaInfo as it also seems to use Qt). I knew about DVDStyler but not the other ones so it was a pleasant surprise.

Of course, I have no idea what are the exact criteria for choosing these 25 “top” projects and there are plenty of Open Source projects not hosted on SourceForge, without even speaking about all the other ones, and so on but, still, it seems like wxWidgets is more popular than I thought (and otherwise I wouldn’t have written this post, would I?).