Ruby on Rails, C# Use on the Rise

Developers in the EMEA region—Europe, Middle East and Africa—have increased their use of Microsofts C#, according to a recent survey by Evans Data.

The number of developers using C# has increased 40 percent during the last year in EMEA, the Evans Data survey showed. In 2006 the number of developers using C# any part of the time was 25.1 percent, and this year that number has risen to 34.9 percent. In addition, the percentage of developers using C# more than half the time has also risen by 40 percent from 9.4 percent to 13.2 percent, said Evans Data, based in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Moreover, more than half of the EMEA developers surveyed claimed Microsofts .Net as the platform of choice for Web services, a slight increase over 2006, the survey showed.

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"Microsoft was smart to have ECMA [formerly known as the European Computer Manufacturers Association] ratify C# early on, as that has helped the language find acceptance in Europe and consolidate its market share," said John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data. "In addition, .Net has made significant inroads in the region and, of course, C# is the language that best reflects the CLI [Common Language Infrastructure], which is at the heart of .Net."

In addition, 65 percent of developers in EMEA either are using or are planning to use AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) in their development efforts, and 40 percent said they are in the process of extending their data and business processes from legacy host systems to new applications.

Meanwhile, Europe also is likely to see an increase in the use of the Ruby on Rails development platform in the next year, according to Jonathan Siegel, founder of ELC Technologies in Santa Barbara, Calif., who will be a keynote speaker at the RailsConf Berlin, next month in Germany.

Siegel said he believes ELC has the biggest team of dedicated Ruby on Rails developers in the world, and he views Europe as the next big market for enterprise Ruby application development. In fact, ELC will be establishing a European headquarters in the coming months, Siegel said.

Indeed, ELC has extensive expertise using Ruby on Rails to deploy enterprise and Web 2.0 applications for Sun Microsystems, Cisco, McKinsey, LiveNation, Media Trust and others. Siegel cited such heavily accessed sites as NASCAR.com and FunnyorDie.com as Ruby-built Web 2.0 sites that handle millions of hits per day. Now European companies are looking to leverage the same performance and advantages, Siegel said.

Siegel added that the demand for Ruby on Rails in business-critical applications is influencing the development of Rails itself.

"At ELC Technologies, we have witnessed this firsthand during the development of a number of highly successful client deployments. Ruby on Rails is transitioning from a .Net and Java replacement to an integrative framework that deploys seamlessly onto existing .Net or Java deployment infrastructures. Leveraging existing .Net/Java libraries and know-how marks a key milestone that demonstrates Ruby on Rails maturity as a commercial framework," Siegel said.

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