Wheels Is Hanging with the Big Boys Just Fine

Well, my first blog post for Wheels. I am <a href="http://www.henke.ws/">Mike Henke</a>. I fell in love with Wheels after I asked my friend <a href="http://www.stillnetstudios.com/">Ryan Stille</a> what ColdFusion framework he thought looked interesting and would like to learn. I always wanted to implement a <abbr title="ColdFusion">CF</abbr> framework at work, but business constraints (time, complexity, learning curve, priority) never worked until I found Wheels. In this entry, I will be providing some surprising and interesting stats showing how Wheels has grown over the past couple years. Here are a couple to start with: CFWheels.org had a spike of over <strong><em>500</em></strong> unique visitors and <strong><em>42 downloads</em></strong> in one day last month. <img src="https://cfwheels.org/images/blog/2009/12/9/google-analytics.png" alt="Number of visits is starting to show an exponential trend." /><!--more--> <em>Traffic from past couple years (Google Analytics)</em> <h2>Here Are the (Surprising) Stats</h2> I mentioned the entry would be about stats. <a href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cfwheels.org">Alexa data</a> as of 12/08/2009: <table> <thead> <tr> <th></th> <th>Alexa Traffic Ranking</th> <th>Traffic Ranking in <abbr title="United States">US</abbr></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td><strong>cfwheels.org</strong></td> <td><strong>320,490</strong></td> <td><strong>61,182</strong></td> </tr> <tr> <td>mach-ii.com</td> <td>n/a</td> <td>1,578,535</td> </tr> <tr> <td>coldboxframework.com</td> <td>744,890</td> <td>332,231</td> </tr> <tr> <td>model-glue.com</td> <td>664,797</td> <td>652,353</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Here are definitions of these metrics in case you aren't familiar: <blockquote><dl> <dt>Alexa Traffic Rank</dt> <dd>A measure of a website's popularity. The rank is calculated using a combinatino of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1. Updated Daily. </dd> <dt>Traffic Rank in Country</dt> <dd>A measure of a website's popularity in a specific country. The rank by country is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews from users from that country over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1 in that country. Updated Daily. </dd> </dl></blockquote> <h2>Take Away</h2> Take away what you may from these, I think it shows how Wheels is growing and filling an area in the ColdFusion framework world. Here are some <a href="http://siteanalytics.compete.com/cfwheels.org+model-glue.com+coldboxframework.com/">stats from Complete.com</a> (amongst top 3 ranking framework sites): <a href="http://siteanalytics.compete.com/cfwheels.org+model-glue.com+coldboxframework.com/?metric=uv"><img src="http://grapher.compete.com/cfwheels.org+model-glue.com+coldboxframework.com_uv_460.png" alt="" /></a> Clearly, in combination with the Alexa rankings listed earlier, CFWheels.org is being looked at, used, and is hanging with the big boys just fine. <h2>Finally</h2> Finally, I would like to mention Wheels's Google Group. It is a great resource. <table><caption>Google Group Member Stats as of 12/07/2009 — <abbr>CFML</abbr> Frameworks</caption> <thead> <tr> <th>Group</th> <th>Members</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>FW/1</td> <td>107</td> </tr> <tr> <td><strong>ColdFusion on Wheels</strong></td> <td><strong>275</strong></td> </tr> <tr> <td>ColdBox</td> <td>289</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Model Glue</td> <td>508</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Mach-II</td> <td>637</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Well, wrapping up my first post for Wheels. I would like to point people towards joining the <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/cfwheels">Google Group for ColdFusion on Wheels</a> and getting in on the fun.