I'm a .NET developer, but after playing around with RoR I have come to realize that ASP.NET MVC with EF just doesn't measure up. RoR is just beautiful. Unfortunately, most companies have managers whom don't know much so they stick to .NET and/or Java.
Instead of investing thousands into Windows Server Licenses and SQL Server licenses, pay your developers more and use Open Source.
Microsoft’s .Net and Java are still winning the software development bake-off, but enterprises and SMBs are increasingly eyeing rich browser interfaces and open source frameworks.
Forrester surveyed 933 IT decision makers and 2,500 developers. That data was supplemented by other data from the Forrester/Dr. Dobbs Technographics survey and the Eclipse Community Survey.
Microsoft’s .Net and Java are the two most widely used platforms and there’s a lot of overlap. According to the survey, 48 percent of enterprises use both platforms and 21 percent of SMBs use both.
Here’s the bake-off slide.
Among the key data points:
- Enterprise and SMBs are allocating more of their budget to new software development projects. In fact, 50 percent of IT budgets are now being allocated to new software projects.
- Funds freed from maintenance and new software licenses are going to custom development. Enterprises are spending 26 percent of the software budget on custom projects.
- Those custom software development projects are getting a 5 percent spending bump in 2011.
- Developers are getting current with .Net, Silverlight and Windows Presentation Framework.
- 40 percent of enterprises and 34 percent of SMBs are adopting Ajax and Adobe Flash.
- 60 percent of developers are planning to use HTML5 in the next two years.
- More than a third of Eclipse developers are building server applications with Apache Software Foundation Tomcat. Red Hat JBoss Hibernate is the prime choice for 41 percent of developers.
- Companies are developing in-house talent for mobile applications. Apple’s iPhone is the favored platform (56 percent) followed by Android at 50 percent. Windows Mobile/Phone 7 came in at 42 percent.
- Eclipse developers favor Amazon EC2 (27 percent) and Google AppEngine (18 percent). Visual Studio developers favor Microsoft Azure (59 percent) and Amazon EC2 (12 percent).
