JavaDevelopers Giving .NET & Java Architectures "Equal Time"

Developers Giving .NET & Java Architectures “Equal Time”

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SANTA CRUZ, CA, October 7, 2002 – The newest installment in Evans Data Corporation’s compendium North American Developer Survey series found that the battle for Web services technical standards is far from decided. More than 600 developers polled in the new survey were virtually split on development plans for Java architecture, on the one hand, and Microsoft’s .NET.

According to the in-depth interviews, 40% of developers are developing apps for Microsoft .NET now but 63% will target .NET a year from now and while 51% are developing for the Java architecture today 61% will be writing for Java next year.

The survey, completed in September, found the prevalence of applications that incorporate Web services are expected to grow significantly in the next year. Web services adoption, which today stands at 57% of developers, will jump to 87% next year.

A little less than half of the developers polled, 43%, are either currently deploying or expect to deploy a Web services application in the next six months. The initial development is weighted more heavily towards internal Web services applications indicating that the first wave of deployed Web services will be business process oriented.

The road to Web services deployments is not without its share of bumps and detours. The most significant obstacles to implementation, according to the survey, are end-to-end security at 24% of responses, ambiguity in Web services standards (21%) and the technical issue of how to architect and integrate services-oriented application architectures (16%).

The survey also asked developers about emerging security standards used with Web services and found the three main emerging security standards are XML encryption at 46% of cases, Security aspects of SOAP (42%) and XML digital signatures at slightly less than 42% of cases.

“Web services appears to be graduating from buzzword to business solution,” said Esther Schindler, Evans Data analyst. “Six months ago, most of the Web services development was happening in departments within a company. Now, we see the experimentation period is coming to an end, and Web services is being adopted by whole enterprises. With the number of developers saying that their applications will be deployed soon, we may begin to see Web services take off in earnest.”

Other notable findings from the bi-annual survey series’ most recent volume:

  • Wireless development is expected to increase in spite of the recent slump in the telecom sector. Almost half of the respondents polled, 48%, indicated that they would be developing wireless applications in the next year.
  • Linux development continues to grow with 8% using Linux as their primary OS and 15% as their secondary development OS. These numbers are expected to continue to increase next year.
  • The number of Visual Basic developers is fundamentally stable but there is a marked migration from Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier to Visual Basic.Net.

The North American Developer Survey series addresses a broad range of concerns, issues and attitudes of developers working in North America. The contents of the survey include: Platform Use and Migrations, Language Usage, Security, Linux, Java, General Internet Development, Tools and Development Issues. The survey also includes numerous cross tabulations of data across different questions such as company size and region. An Overview, Table of Contents and Sample Pages from the 2002 North American Developer Survey Vol. 2 can be seen at: http://www.evansdata.com/NATOC2002_2.htm

About Evans Data Corporation

Evans Data Corporation provides regularly updated IT industry market intelligence based on in-depth surveys of the global developer population. The company maintains the largest independent panel of IT developers, numbering over 15,000. Evans’ syndicated research series includes the North American Developer Survey, International Developer Survey, Chinese Developer Survey, Enterprise Development Management Issues Survey, Linux Developer Survey, Database Developer Survey, Wireless Developer Survey and Embedded Systems Developer Survey. Customers for the company’s research include IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems HP and Nokia.

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