SW Development Tools

Last year, four of the seven products that made it to the
User’s Choice Club were from Microsoft. All were tools that were part of
Visual Studio. Two of these have received enough points to enter the User’s
Choice Club this year too. One of them–Visual Basic–emerges as the
most-preferred development tool today. Taking its roots from Basic–one of the
earliest and easiest high-level programming languages–Visual Basic continues
to encash upon its ease of use.

Oracle and Java had just entered the pipeline last year, and
have moved up to the runner up and third positions respectively this year. Last
year, e-commerce was the happening thing, and the prime ingredient for
developing an e-commerce application was a database. This could have fuelled the
need for Oracle as the development environment. Other mantras that could also
have contributed to its popularity as a development environment were knowledge
management and data warehousing. Oracle’s version 8i was another major asset,
which improved its Web presence.

Where Java was concerned, being free and platform-independent
made it the language of choice for development on the Web. That could also have
been the reason why it topped the honors of User’s Choice this year in the Web
development software segment.

Borland has made a comeback this year, with its Delphi RAD
(Rapid Application Development) environment. Visual C++ seems to be going down
in popularity, and only managed to come last in the list.

Interestingly, current usage was reported the highest for
Java, followed by Visual Basic. Visual Basic doesn’t have the huge lead that
it had last year. The UPI of Oracle and Java has increased manifold. So for now,
all eyes are on Oracle and Java as the preferred develop- ment tools next year.
Let’s see how right the crystal ball

will be.