You can check out the top 10 Ajax toolkits from 2006 and 2005 at the end of this blog.
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.
That's brings up another point: The survey is not limited to Ajax frameworks and toolkits, it also includes some JavaScript libraries commonly used in Ajax development. All of the entries were derived from Ajaxpatterns.org as well as past surveys. There are probably quite a few of these frameworks that have been abandoned and others that were missed, so its not a perfect record of available Ajax toolkits and libraries today.
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.
Spry is growing quickly and may be in the top 10 next year. Spry was left out of the survey for the first day or so and then added in as it was the most popular write in toolkit. It may have faired better if it was an option from the start. I added up all the write-ins for Spry with picks after the survey was adjusted. The numbers are not great - Spry has about 4% of the market right now
The number of responses were much higher this year (2,619) compared to 2006 (865) and 2005 (763). The increase is enough to say that Ajaxian.com has become more popular and so has Ajax but you can't go much beyond that. In addition, the entire survey has to be taken with a large licking-block of salt. It's not scientific and probably breaks about 100 rules for best practices when doing a survey. However, given the limitations of the survey and the surveyor (that's me), it still provides valuable insight to the Ajax toolkit market in general.