What is the most popular web development IDE?
What is the most popular web development language?
Is there any way of getting absolute figures on these issues (percentage-wise)?
I think it really depends on what you are doing.
For instance if I am working on a J2EE application I will use Eclipse or Netbeans, but if I am working on PHP I prefer to use the Zend IDE.
Of course HTML, Javascript, and CSS can be done with notepad or an enhanced notepad. I steer clear of any WYSIWYG editors unless I can control the HTML output.
As far as the most popular languages that again is up for debate. Some people prefer PHP or Python, but others would much rather use a more enterprise level language/framework such as J2EE or ASP.Net.
Edit:
I want to clarify what I mean by enterprise level language. PHP and Python are used in an enterprise level (ie. Google uses Python almost exclusively) but they can also be used outside an enterprise environment. When I think of an enterprise level language/framework, J2EE and ASP.Net come to my mind first. That could be because of the fact that they are utilized in containers or specific servers.
J2EE has be used with special containers (Tomcat) or special application servers (Glassfish or Oracle Application Server). ASP.Net has be used with specific server software as well.
They must also be utilized in a mutlitiered environment. Eg. 3-tiered environment. Presentation (Frontend) tier, Data (Backend) tier, and Logic (Middle) tier.
Strictly on popularity with no assertion of the "correctness" the answer is PHP or ASP.Net, which is going to mean the most popular editor is Visual Studio (probably 2005) on thr grounds that the PHP lot are more free/fragmented with their choice of IDE where the .Net people really aren't.
In terms of actual numbers, I think there was an interesting thread on googlefights with respect to this a while back which linked to this, and this article also makes for interesting reading.
On the Mac side of things:
Among the Rails/Django crowd the TextMate/CSSEdit combination seems to be pretty popular.
For static pages I think Coda has a pretty devoted following. I don't know the actual numbers though.
Popularity may be rather hard to explicity define in a way that can be computed. Does the number of licenses really measure how many places are using a particular language or framework for those that have licenses that could be tracked in such a manner? Or would the number of companies with a license be a fair metric? Would the number of individuals using an IDE be fair and would it have to be the one they use most as some may use multiple IDEs? Would the number of lines of code of each language or IDE be adequate?
The other question is whether or not you mean some minimum amount of structure to define "enterprise," e.g. a 3-tier architecture with a front-end, middle tier and database tier. Also, what is considered a framework: Is .Net adequate even though it may be used for developing Windows applications or console applications that use the web in some part of the application? Does the Enterprise Library from Microsofy count as a framework or ASP.Net MVC? How much of a web component is needed to count as there are web pages, applications, and services that all can have some code behind them?
The question is rather vague in terms of pinning down some of these terms is my main point.
The most popular web development languages are PHP and ASP/ASP.NET (Numerous Languages but typically VB or C#) as well as Ruby.
Each has it's own framework(s) that make web development very productive.
Does anyone have any actual stats on the most popular languages? (defined in whatever way)
The BuiltWith.com website provides some statistics as to the relative usage of the different web devlopment frameworks. The current top 5 frameworks are: