Santa Cruz, CA — (press release excerpt) — Evans Data Corp. today announced findings from its North American Developer Survey indicating developers are much more likely to use Microsoft's .NET APIs or Sun's J2EE APIs for web services application to application integration than other methods but neither is dominant.

Evans' report, an in-depth survey of over 800 software developers, found that .NET and J2EE APIs share the lead as most likely application integrations of web services at 28% and 27% respectively. The next closest approach for app to app integration of web services is custom code at 11%. Proprietary EAI products accounted for just 4.2% of responses. Almost half of developers surveyed expect Java and .NET applications to intermix in their companies and nearly 40% expect to use XML to integrate the two. Web services may change how applications are developed and interact as much as the way that the Web has changed how information is shared now.

More than half of all developers expect to develop Web services within the next six months and forty percent are already working on developing them today. Web services are rapidly gaining prominence with more than 9 in 10 developers expecting their companies to use Web services in the next two years. According to the survey, the main obstacles to creating web services are; the lack of established web services standards, concerns about end-to-end security and other security issues and understanding the architecture.

Fielded in March 2002, the North American Developer Survey noted other key development-related trends:

• Security issues continue to be an important factor in software development with biometrics (34%) as the leading choice for best authentication method ahead of passwords, digital signatures, smart cards and tokens
• Of currently proposed authentication standards, the three options — Microsoft Passport (38.5%), Liberty Alliance (19.4%), and AOL/Time Warner's Magic Carpet (2.4%) — were overshadowed by the 'Other' responses (54.8%), indicating a large group uncommitted to any standard

 
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