The annual Eclipse Community Survey has some interesting findings about what open source developers' preferences and concerns.

The number of responses to this year's Eclipse Community Survey was disappointingly small - 704 individuals responded of whom 624 completed the entire survey whereas in 2010 there were 1,696 completed surveys.

However, the survey did reach the appropriate audience: 54.6% identified themselves as programmers, 14.9% as system architects, and 8.3% as development managers with more that two-thirds (68.6%) of the respondents spending more than 17 hours a week writing code, testing, and debugging.

A new question in this year's survey concerned mobile apps:

In turns out that 38% of respondents have already developed mobile applications either for internal users or external customers and another 27% have plans for doing so within the next 18 months. 

Although the report concludes that there is a trend towards deploying applications to a cloud infrastructure, with reference to changes from last year's survey, more than half of respondents have no plans to do so and only 8% deploy the majority of their applications to the cloud.

The report also noted that while Amazon continues to be the most popular choice for cloud deployments (29%), using a private cloud was in second place at 23% (an increase from 16% in 2010).

As last year Subversion is the dominant source code management system (51%, down from 58% in 2010) and the minority choices Git/GitHub and Mercurial both showed increase. Ant was the clear leader as build management tool with 48% share but Hudson/Jenkins had gained in popularity (from 22% in 2010 to 32%).

Other findings concern language and IDE preference. Java is by far the most popular language with 76% naming it as their main choice but many developers tend you use more than one language with a significant number using JavaScript (36%), C/C++ (33%), PHP (21%) and Python (20%). Hardly surprisingly given that this is the Eclipse survey Eclipse JDT was the most popular primary development environment (68%). More interesting is the finding that developers adopt new versions of Eclipse very quickly with 77% having moved to Eclipse 3.6 (Helios) in less than a year. 92% of respondents said they were satisfied or very satisfied with Eclipse.

Related news:

Eclipse Community Survey Reveals .... what ?

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