Developer’s
Corner
 What
Tools and Languages are Most Widely Used?
What type of development tools and languages are
most widely used by developers?
Here’s some insight taken from a study by the
Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG).
Based on the IOUG survey, it looks like Oracle
Development Tools are dominating the development
landscape. The largest segment of Oracle shops use
the Oracle Development Suite in their application
development work, the survey states. Beyond Oracle
toolsets, the picture is decidedly mixed. For
example, about one of five also report they use
Microsoft’s Visual Studio integrated development
environment. About one out of 10 use Oracle
Application Express (formerly HTML DB) for Web
development, followed by the open source Eclipse
toolkit.
IBM WebSphere and the Eclipse project compete for
fifth place. NetBeans, considered by many to be a
direct competitor to Eclipse, is only at use among a
small handful of respondents. Adoption of
programming and scripting languages is also a mixed
picture at Oracle sites, the survey finds. Most
popular is Structured Query Language (SQL), the
preferred method for writing instructions to access
data in relational databases. Close
to eight out of 10 database developers are using
SQL, the survey confirms. Almost three out of four
also use PL/SQL, Oracle’s Procedural Language
extension to SQL. PL/SQL is used to write programs
to manipulate data specifically in Oracle databases.
PL/SQL usage is roughly the same since this question
was asked in 2001, when 77 percent reported using
PL/SQL, the survey notes. Regular use of the Java
language has changed little since 2001, when 40
percent of Oracle sites reported using the
multi-platform language.
In the current survey, 38 percent report using Java
on a regular basis within their applications. Some
of the competitive pressure on Java may be coming
from the trio of open-source languages that have
increasingly grown popular in recent years – Perl,
PHP, and Python. While usage of these languages on
an individual basis is confined to a relatively
small minority of Oracle shops, the combination of
the three may be helping to dampen growth of
languages offered through commercial sources.
Leading the way is Perl, used at more than one out
of five Oracle shops. Perl, or Practical Extraction
and Report Language, is an open source programming
language that incorporates features from C, shell
scripting, and other programming languages. PHP,
an open source, general-purpose scripting language
that is typically applied to Web development, is in
use at a handful of sites, as is Python, an open
source interpreted, interactive, object-oriented
programming language.
While many in the industry have speculated on the
imminent demise of C/C++, this survey finds this set
of languages is still used at close to one out of
seven Oracle sites. However, this percentage has
declined since the 2001 survey, when 28 percent
reported working with this language set. More
Web-friendly languages such as Java and C# have
overshadowed C/C++, the survey notes.
Visual Basic, which now is part of Microsoft’s .NET
Framework, is also still used at about one out of
five Oracle sites covered in this survey. While this
is down somewhat from 24 percent in 2001, it’s worth
noting that there is still a huge worldwide base of
loyal Visual Basic users in both the Microsoft and
Oracle worlds.
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