Wireless development has been a hotspot in the industry for the last couple of years and recent survey findings provide a good measure of what the future holds for wireless applications.
"Developers themselves are pretty gung-ho about wireless development," vice president for research at Evans Data Corportation, Janel Gavin said at the launch of the Wireless Development Survey 2001 at IBM's Technical Developer Conference in San Francisco.
The international sample of professional software developers outpaced North American respondents in response to the question if they intended to write wireless applications in the next year, with 49 percent saying they probably would, compared to 42 percent in North America.
In two years a third of those wireless applications are expected to be large-scale implementations deployed to thousands of users, Gavin said.
Developers were also asked how many users they expected to employ over six and 24 months. Within the six month timeframe, nine percent of developers said they expected to employ over 1000 users, and this number shot up to 33 percent in two years' time.
Whilst mobile phones and PDAs remain the two most popular targets for wireless applications, email is the most widespread type of wireless application, with instant messaging hot on its heels after pushing e-commerce out of the number two spot it had six months ago, the survey found.
Evans reserach has also found that emerging technologies like Linux and XML continue to grow by leaps and bounds.
"XML, Linux, Web services and Wireless are really the areas of hot interest amongst the developers these days. Maybe next year there will be a new technology, but this is what they're concentrating on now," Gavin said. "XML is a really exciting and interesting area for us because it's been really adopted by programmers so vigorously."
International developers outpaced their North American counterparts again in the use of XML, with 16 percent in October 1999 using it, 38 percent using it now, and 53 percent of respondents sayig they would be using it by next year. In September 1999, 20 percent of North American developers were using XML, compared to 36 percent of developers using it in April 2001, and 42 percent said they thought they would be using it by next year.
Evans'Linux Developer Survey 2001 found that International developers were far more positive in their acceptance of the Linux operating system, with up to 40 percent of large enterprises (with over 2000 people) currently running Linux on some of their servers and 50 percent expecting to next year.
"In large enterprises the recovery is already underway from the loss of confidence in Linux caused by the dot.com fiasco," Gavin said.
Developers are also embracing Web services really quickly, according to Gavin, with 70 percent of International developers saying they expected to adopt Web services next year.
Java and SOAP are neck and neck for the most popular underlying technology to build Web services, Gavin said and Windows 2000 and Linux stand out as the operating systems intended to be used for writing Web services.
Rachel Lebihan travelled to San Francisco as a guest of IBM
