Eclipse is making inroads on Microsofts tools dominance in the European, Middle Eastern and African, or EMEA, region.
A recent Evans Data survey showed that the adoption rate of Eclipse has more than doubled in the EMEA region, raising the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment) as a challenge to Microsoft Visual Studio.Net among developers there. Evans announced the results of its survey on Dec. 11.
According to Evans Data, of Santa Cruz, Calif., one-third of the developers surveyed in the EMEA region said they are using Eclipse. In addition, the Evans Data EMEA Development Survey said that the use of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, a set of plug-ins for developing rich-client applications, is expected to triple within the next two years.
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"These results are reflective of the overall market adoption we are seeing for Eclipse adoption globally," John Andrews, president of Evans Data, said in a statement. "The addition of the Rich Client Platform provides the developers a great advantage being able to write an application once and it will run on Windows, Mac OS and Linux."
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, of Ottawa, said the Evans report confirms Eclipses growth globally as the platform of choice for developers. "We are particularly happy with the continued momentum of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform," Milinkovich said in a statement.
Other findings from the Evans Winter 2006 survey showed that 42 percent of EMEA developers use XML, and the use of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) grew by 12 percent over the last survey. In addition, developers surveyed said they consider Java frameworks to be the most important Java feature for their development projects. At the same time, the use of refactoring more than doubled during the period.
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