Grails usage statistics

[pledbrook]

Dear all,

How many people are using Grails? What versions? On which platforms?
And which public plugins do they have installed in their projects?
These are all questions that we cannot answer at the moment, making it
difficult to know where to focus our efforts.

We would like to add a feature to Grails that will store anonymous
usage information and occasionally send that information to us over
HTTP. Before doing so, we'd like to get feedback from the community on
such a feature. To allay concerns about privacy, here are a few more
details:

* The feature is designed to avoid identifying you and your applications
* No data will be sent unless you explicitly opt in and accept the terms of use
* You will be able to see what data is being stored and sent
* No personal or organisational information will intentionally be included
* IP addresses will not be correlated with the data sent

We believe that doing this will benefit the community as a whole:

* Users will be able to see what public plugins are in widespread use
* Plugin authors will learn how many people are using their plugins
* Everyone will benefit from better targeting of development resources

If you'd like to learn more about this proposal, we have published an
FAQ at http://www.springsource.org/uaa/faq. It explains in detail how
the technology works and answers common privacy-related queries. Let
us know what you think and if you have any further questions please
don't hesitate to ask.

Regards,

Peter

--
Peter Ledbrook
Grails Advocate
SpringSource - A Division of VMware

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[tomas lin]

Would this happen at War build time or would our apps periodically call home?

Will this crash my grails app when the server gets Oracled?

How would this help you determine the number of people using grails?

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Peter Ledbrook <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> How many people are using Grails? What versions? On which platforms?
> And which public plugins do they have installed in their projects?
> These are all questions that we cannot answer at the moment, making it
> difficult to know where to focus our efforts.
>
> We would like to add a feature to Grails that will store anonymous
> usage information and occasionally send that information to us over
> HTTP. Before doing so, we'd like to get feedback from the community on
> such a feature. To allay concerns about privacy, here are a few more
> details:
>
> * The feature is designed to avoid identifying you and your applications
> * No data will be sent unless you explicitly opt in and accept the terms of use
> * You will be able to see what data is being stored and sent
> * No personal or organisational information will intentionally be included
> * IP addresses will not be correlated with the data sent
>
> We believe that doing this will benefit the community as a whole:
>
> * Users will be able to see what public plugins are in widespread use
> * Plugin authors will learn how many people are using their plugins
> * Everyone will benefit from better targeting of development resources
>
> If you'd like to learn more about this proposal, we have published an
> FAQ at http://www.springsource.org/uaa/faq. It explains in detail how
> the technology works and answers common privacy-related queries. Let
> us know what you think and if you have any further questions please
> don't hesitate to ask.
>
> Regards,
>
> Peter
>
> --
> Peter Ledbrook
> Grails Advocate
> SpringSource - A Division of VMware
>
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> To unsubscribe from this list, please visit:
>
>    http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
>
>
>

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[Marc Palmer Local]

On 8 Feb 2011, at 11:04, Peter Ledbrook wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> How many people are using Grails? What versions? On which platforms?
> And which public plugins do they have installed in their projects?
> These are all questions that we cannot answer at the moment, making it
> difficult to know where to focus our efforts.
>

100% agreed!

> We would like to add a feature to Grails that will store anonymous
> usage information and occasionally send that information to us over
> HTTP. Before doing so, we'd like to get feedback from the community on
> such a feature. To allay concerns about privacy, here are a few more
> details:
>
> * The feature is designed to avoid identifying you and your applications
> * No data will be sent unless you explicitly opt in and accept the terms of use
> * You will be able to see what data is being stored and sent
> * No personal or organisational information will intentionally be included
> * IP addresses will not be correlated with the data sent
>
> We believe that doing this will benefit the community as a whole:
>
> * Users will be able to see what public plugins are in widespread use
> * Plugin authors will learn how many people are using their plugins
> * Everyone will benefit from better targeting of development resources

I was initially very excited by this, but I'm starting to feel less so having read the FAQ.

Reasons for this:

* It appears to only upload info "When one of those tools needs to access a VMware domain". This may be never for many Grails setups, right?
* Anonymity is all well and good, but prevents a wealth of very useful features for the community. Presumably there must be some kind of cookie in use to identify the end user and de-dupe stats, but this won't work across machines. The info on plugins etc. may be of limited use.
* What info about Grails usage will it actually capture
* I think bundling general usage tracking along with plugin stats tracking may be more unattractive to people than just submitting plugin info, and hence the viability of those stats may be compromised.

I strongly think that for any plugin stats, the only useful stats can come from when people run grails war - and a user name/id is required to de-dupe and bundle this info together.

From this we can work out when people install/uninstall plugins, and hence get the "last known" total number of people *using* a plugin, patterns of use and then discard of plugins over time etc.

So my vote is -1 for bundling this general usage tracking with plugin tracking.

I would +1 for usage tracking as an optional separate concern from plugin usage tracking.

There are three parties being served by all this. The end user - more so by plugin info than usage info. SpringSource - more so by usage info than plugin info, and plugin authors - more so by plugin info than the rest.

Marc
~ ~ ~
Marc Palmer
Freelancer (Grails/Groovy/Java)

Blog         > http://www.anyware.co.uk
Twitter      > http://twitter.com/wangjammer5
Grails Rocks > http://www.grailsrocks.com








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[pledbrook]

> * It appears to only upload info "When one of those tools needs to access a VMware domain". This may be never for many Grails setups, right?

This would happen in the future with commands like list-plugins, etc.
that contact grails.org.

> * Anonymity is all well and good, but prevents a wealth of very useful features for the community. Presumably there must be some kind of cookie in use to identify the end user and de-dupe stats, but this won't work across machines. The info on plugins etc. may be of limited use.

The technology will be able to remove duplicates in a variety of ways,
but I think you're right that it won't distinguish between the same
user on different computers. I'll find out more on this.

> * What info about Grails usage will it actually capture

The number of people and projects using Grails and the public plugins
that are active in those projects. Also, what platforms are in use.

> * I think bundling general usage tracking along with plugin stats tracking may be more unattractive to people than just submitting plugin info, and hence the viability of those stats may be compromised.

Possibly, but I think the other stats are just as valuable to users.

> I strongly think that for any plugin stats, the only useful stats can come from when people run grails war - and a user name/id is required to de-dupe and bundle this info together.

I don't understand this. Why only when grails war is run?

Thanks for the feedback,

Peter

--
Peter Ledbrook
Grails Advocate
SpringSource - A Division of VMware

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[pledbrook]

> Would this happen at War build time or would our apps periodically call home?

The idea is that Grails would send usage data with commands like
list-plugins, install-plugin, etc. If there is consensus on doing
something when the WAR is created (for added value), we could add that
in.

> Will this crash my grails app when the server gets Oracled?

Oracled?

> How would this help you determine the number of people using grails?

We would get real usage data, albeit anonymised. We could find out how
many projects use it and how many people (not withstanding the
'multiple machine' issue brought up by Marc).

Peter

--
Peter Ledbrook
Grails Advocate
SpringSource - A Division of VMware

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[Sebastian Hohns]

Marc Palmer Local wrote

* Anonymity is all well and good, but prevents a wealth of very useful features for the community. Presumably there must be some kind of cookie in use to identify the end user and de-dupe stats, but this won't work across machines. The info on plugins etc. may be of limited use.

Should be enough to create a UUID after the grails installation and send it together with a hash of the app name (average team size (UUID / hash of appname)). Yes, this way we will get some duplicates (Bookstore,...), but i don't think anybody needs 100% correct data.

Another important information is a "Grails version in use" statistic. No need to test a plugin for version nobody is using anymore.