Today OpenLogic published its report on open source adoption trends in the enterprise. The company analyzed Google search results, its own OLEX search and download data, its own customer support contracts and its customers’ platform-as-a-service deployments to determine which projects are trending up or down in terms of enterprise adoption in 2011. These obviously aren’t perfect metrics, and are going to skew towards OpenLogic customers rather than the broader enterprise, but they do shed some some light on open source adoption trends.

Top five biggest gainers in 2011 were:

1. HBase
2. Node.js
3. nginx
4. Hadoop
5. Rails

MongoDB is also trending up.

This is fairly consistent with what I’ve been hearing. HBase was all the rage at Hadoop World this year, Ruby just keeps growing despite the growth and interest in other languages and I always hear a lot about MongoDB. I was a little surprised to see so much enterprise growth for Node.js, but given the level of interest in the platform and Microsoft’s support, maybe I shouldn’t have been. On the other hand, the Google search traffic might be skewing the results, as might the fact that OpenLogic customers might be more interested in Node.js than most enterprises.

The following projects are trending level:

• Tomcat
• Apache HTTP Server
• Spring
• Grails
• Struts
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL

And these projects are trending down:

• JBoss
• GlassFish
• CouchDB

The top packages on OLEX at the time of this writing are:

• Tomcat
• JBoss
• PHP
• MySQL
• Hibernate
• PostgreSQL
• JDK
• Python
• Apache HTTP Server
• Struts

My takeaway: most of the traditional enterprise development tools – Java, PHP, relational databases, etc. – are in fine shape. But the real growth continues to be in NoSQL and big data. That’s because, with the possible exception of Node.js, these tools solve new problems. They’re not displacing old technologies, they are complementing them. However, JavaScript and Ruby could start to displace Java and Microsoft languages if using JRuby with Hadoop catches on, or Microsoft’s promotion of JavaScript for Hadoop (and just about everything else) gains traction.