A bit later than usual, but here it is! The year in review of dimitr.im! (Yes, that’s the site you’re visiting right now) During this time of the year (though we’re a bit too late), people all around the world gather and review last year. We, we jump onto that bandwagon and do the same thing!

Visitors

While last year we gained a lot visitors, this time we didn’t get a huge increase in traffic, but we were able to maintain our record and the amount of visitors slightly increased.

So, I guess we can safely say that we’re reaching an equilibrium here.

War of the browsers

If we look at the webbrowsers our users are using, we can see that the war of the webbrowsers isn’t much of a war anymore. With 78%, Google Chrome is an obvious winner.

Most browsers appear to have their browser usage on a declining rate. However we see that Internet Explorer users are slowly migrating to Edge, (which is #6 in the rankings). However, even if we include both IE and Edge together, they’re still having a (slightly) declining rate.

Mobile experience

If we take a look at the amount of mobile users, we can see that users still prefer their desktop computer/laptop when visiting us, since only 5% uses an alternative device (smartphone, tablet, phablet, …), this is slightly worse than last year, when 5,5% used an alternative device.

If we take a look at the mobile devices that are being used, we can see that Apple wins this fight, with both the iPad as the iPhone take spot 1 and 2. They are followed by the Google Nexus devices and Samsung.

1. Apple iPad
2. Apple iPhone
3. Google Nexus 5
4. Google Nexus 7
5. Samsung Galaxy S4
6. Google Nexus 4
7. OnePlus
8. Samsung Galaxy S5
9. Feiteng GT-i9300
10. Google Nexus 10

What operating system do we use

Even if Microsoft is not scoring as high on the mobile devices or the webbrowser usage, they’re still having a good time with Windows. While 56,5% users visited this website using Windows, 24% used Mac and 14% used a Linux distro.

Tutorials

If we take a look at what we published last year, I think I can be very proud. With 23 tutorials last year, we did slightly better than last year. As promised in last years review, we rewrote several old Spring-related tutorials and updated them to Spring boot. Next to Spring boot-related tutorials we also introduced some new tutorials about Angular (2).

From our articles released in 2016, Using Docker containers for your Spring boot applications was the most visited one.

Looking ahead

This year we will continue rewriting some old Spring boot tutorials since some of them didn’t make it to the schedule of last year. These will be released over the next few weeks:

• Using Hystrix with Spring boot
• Using AngularJS with Spring boot (A small series divided into three parts)

And these might be worked out:

• Using Spring Security with Spring boot (Presumably a multi-part series covering OAuth, basic authentication and form login)
• Using the Spring cloud config service
• Proxy’ing REST calls through Zuul
• Using MongoDB with Spring boot
• Talking asynchronously with MQLight
• Batch processing with Spring batch
• Using Solr with Spring Data
• Sending mails with JavaMail
• Changing the log levels with Spring Boot Admin

We also want to explore progressive webapps, Aurelia and Vue.

Changes to the website

The website itself didn’t chang much last year, the top navigation changed a bit after we learned that not many people clicked those other links anyways. We also introduced a new logo last year, which I’ll probably keep using this year as well:

Since the start of 2017 we also introduced HTTPS using Let’s Encrypt. The reason for this is that the web is making the move to HTTPS, with search engines making websites over HTTPS score higher and browsers marking nonHTTPS websites as unsafe, it’s time to make the switch as well. That’s about it for now!