Evans Data Knows Developers - Benefit of Dynamic Languages (
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What do you think the benefit of dynamic languages is for developers
who want to launch new and next-generation applications and make money?
If you look at people who are doing Web 2.0-ish kinds of things like RIAs
and social networking mashups, scripting languages dominate and, based on our
research, are utilized about two times more than the Microsoft set of products.
XML, of course, plays a big part in that. And then following the scripting
languages is Java.
So that whole agile programming phenomenon that everybody talks about and
using these lightweight languages is indeed being leveraged. And when you think
about those dynamic languages or scripting languages, you've got JavaScript,
which is the leader, followed by PHP. And we find in our research that one of
the highest growth areas is with Ruby. Ruby's growth rate is higher than both
JavaScript and PHP.
We hear tales that Java is passe, that particularly for enterprise application
development lighter-weight frameworks are taking over. Do you see that in your
research?
Clearly, Java's reached a point where the growth rates are hard to get to.
Clearly, these lighter-weight implementations are being used where possible.
But when people prognosticate about the death of Java, it's not going anywhere.
We see a world that's very heterogeneous. There's a whole set of
capabilities that Java does extremely well that these dynamic languages aren't
going to replace. And furthermore, if it's working, these enterprises aren't
going to go out and rearrange their plumbing for a fad.
So no, Java's here to stay. And Java's done a much better job with the
lightweight implementations in the mobility world. So it's pervasive in the
mobility world. And now they've come out with JavaFX, which is supposed to play
a little bit in the RIA world.
How much traction have you folks seen for agile development?
Our recent research says if you're building applications in the realm of
social networking, rich Internet or Web 2.0, four out of 10 developers are
using agile programming techniques. And over the next 12 to 18 months, the
forecast is another 30 percent will adopt it. So this whole lightweight
implementation, combining both public and internal data into very interactive
applications with smaller teams, is perfect for agile. So it's going
gangbusters, because by our calculations, 30 percent of all developers are
doing Web 2.0 stuff.
Application Development 
