2005 survey spots trends in software development

Software developers are often important augurs of IT technologies’ direction and rate of adoption. Managers who responded to trends among developers would have been the first to detect the growth of Linux and the open source movement, the emergence of Java as a significant platform for server-based computing, and the arrival of integration technologies such as XML and Web services.

In this spirit, our annual Programming Research Report surveys application development professionals from among InfoWorld’s core readership, in hopes of finding likely portents of the evolution of business computing technologies.

This year’s results, gathered from a sampling of nearly 300 respondents, indicate that many software development tools and technologies are in transition. Web services, SOA, and open source tools are definitely enjoying wider adoption and are steadily pushing into the business mainstream. Technologies likely to earn continued favor include Microsoft’s .Net development platform, dynamic scripting tools, and, of course, Java. Traditional development languages, such as C/C++ and other pure compiled languages will come under steady pressure.

Finally, features such as modeling that improve software quality are definitely seeing wider adoption than in previous years, although most of the basic tools that assure software quality are still far from universally deployed. But let’s start with fundamentals.

Platforms and languages
In last year’s survey, we concluded that developers remained conservative in their choice

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of deployment platforms. Having compared the number of this year’s respondents who indicated increased commitment to each platform, less the number who indicated decreased commitment, we see that this trend continues intact. Notable exceptions are Microsoft’s .Net environment and Mac OS X, which are gaining momentum. The loser this time around, however, seems to be Win32, which is finally showing its age as the only deployment platform with a shrinking user base.

Operating systems exhibit a slightly different profile. Linux and Windows continue to dominate. The Mac OS and a few handheld operating systems show some growth, while vendor-specific and legacy operating systems continue to drop.

Unix suffers particularly badly, with only Solaris able to tread water. It is clear that Linux is

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swallowing up Unix implementations as well as mainframe deployments (the latter still being actively supported by IBM). As Linux fills out its enterprise credentials, it will likely supplant all versions of Unix and all mainframe operating systems. This transition is still a few years away, but the trend is in place. Linux has only to show it can deliver the goods for very large implementations to claim the crown it’s been driving toward.