Survey shows continued Developer shift to Java

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: WaveMaker Software has recently announced the results of a recent survey of over 50 members of its 15,000-member developer community.

The survey focused on how and why developers are migrating from proprietary development platforms to standards-based Java.

What platforms are being modernized?

Almost half of the developers in the survey are migrating from proprietary Microsoft platforms like MS Access (25 percent of responses) and MS .NET (24 percent of responses). Other common platforms include Oracle Forms (8 percent), PowerBuilder (8 percent) and Lotus Notes (4 percent).

What are the drivers for migrating from Microsoft tools to Java?

Over half of all survey respondents are moving from proprietary development platforms to Java to get better support for web development and take advantage of less expensive, open source software. One third of respondents are choosing a new development platform to get better support for cloud development.

    * Better support for web development 69 percent

    * Moving to open source 58 percent

    * Moving to Java 42 percent

    * Better support for cloud development 33 percent

Flattening the learning curve for Java

According to stackoverflow.com, the average time to learn the Java core is about 10 weeks for an experienced developer - that is just for the language and not for frameworks like Java EE, Spring, Hibernate and Ajax. Survey developers reported that their average time to learn Java using a visual development framework like WaveMaker was 4.4 weeks, less than half the time required to just learn the Java core.

Benefits of Visual development platform for Java

A visual development platform for Java such as WaveMaker can dramatically lower development costs. On average, developers reported writing 60 percent less code with WaveMaker than with a proprietary development platform like Visual Studio. In large part this is because WaveMaker includes a visual IDE that eliminates the need to write code to create basic, form-driven Java applications.

Developers also reported an average 50 percent improvement in productivity using WaveMaker and a 60 percent reduction in application maintenance costs. Again, this can be attributed to WaveMaker's drag and drop IDE. Because WaveMaker generates standard Java applications, developers can switch back and forth between the WYSIWYG WaveMaker studio and a Java coding IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans.