Eclipse users developing on Linux, considering cloud
Eclipse Foundation's latest report shows that Linux is growing at the expense of Windows and that developers are interested, but not convinced of the cloud.
The open-source Eclipse development environment has become one of the mainstay options for developers thanks to its extensibility and support from a broad range of organizations, both open-source and private.
Every year, the Eclipse Foundation publishes the results of its community survey and this year's report shows that open-source adoption is continuing to grow, with a number of projects emerging as clear leaders among Eclipse developers.
The primary takeaway from the results is the shift in how engineers are choosing to develop and deploy. Linux, especially Ubuntu, has taken market share from Windows on an ongoing basis, and is now used by just shy of one third of respondents as their developer desktop, up from 20 percent in 2007.
Linux also continues to be the most popular deployment operating system with 46 percent of developers choosing to deploy on various flavors. This also speaks to the growing interest in deploying to cloud providers which can offer the same stack that developers use internally, or on their desktop.
Deploying to a cloud infrastructure is a current option or planned option for 29.5 percent of the respondents. Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, and a private cloud are the popular choices for those considering a cloud infrastructure. I expect this figure to grow over the next year or two as more options for highly scalable Java in the cloud come to market.
Other highlights:
- Developers are using multiple languages: Java, C/C++, JavaScript leading the pack
- Spring is the most popular framework (19.7 percent) for building server side applications, but doesn't hold a huge margin over other options
- Apache Tomcat is the dominant application server (33.8 percent) but nearly as many developers (30.8 percent) don't use an app server at all
- Java developers are deploying to Sun Hotspot JVM (69.8 percent) and Open JDK (21.7 percent)
- Subversion is the dominant source code repository with 58.3 percent of the respondents as users
As with any other survey it's important to take the data with a grain of salt, especially since the respondents are all Eclipse users and most likely supporters of open source. That said, it's always good to get a pulse of the developer market and to see how open source is continuing to grow.