Developers in Brazil expect their use of the Ruby scripting language to double in the next year, according to an Evans Data Corp. survey of 400 developers in Brazil, China, India and Eastern Europe. Although roughly 16 percent of developers in Brazil use Ruby today, almost a third expect to use it next year. Of the emerging markets studied, Ruby use is currently strongest in China, with 20 percent of developers using it today.

Evans expects only minor growth in China during the coming year.

“Ruby has been creating a sensation in the development world because of its object-oriented nature, good exception handling and simple, elegant ease of use.” said John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data Corp. “That combination is very appealing to developers in emerging markets, and we foresee Ruby use surpassing the use of several other scripting languages in the near future.”

Javascript is the most commonly used scripting language in emerging markets as well as elsewhere. Over 80% of Chinese developers report using Javascript some of the time, 76% using it in India, 71% using it in Eastern Europe, and 69% in Brazil. However, little or no growth is expected in these areas.

Other findings from this in-depth survey released last week include:

• Use of PHP, which is used by a third of developers in India, is expected to grow fastest in that country
• One-third of developers in emerging markets are currently using virtualization or expect to in the next six months, with the strongest uptake in Brazil and China.
• China has by far the worst security experience in the BRIC countries, with 90% reporting an incident within the last year.

» Story on Analyst Firm Website

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