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Early this year I did a developer survey through my blog. I got over 1500 answers and I safely can say 87% use Delphi as their primarily development tools, the other 13% split between C#, C/C++, PHP and other languages.

Mobile Development

On the mobile development arena I asked about their company plans for mobile development in 2013, and the results are interesting:

On Android development, 45% will develop apps for Android, 16% maybe will do some development and 5% don’t have any plan in 2013.

28% will develop apps for iOS, 24% maybe will do some development, which we can consider pretty high, and 11% don’t have any plan for iOS in 2013.

Windows Phone is not in a good position; only 13% will do development for Windows Phone. Looking for the Microsoft Tablet (Surface), this one is way behind.

BlackBerry is not the favorite platform and has only 3% of the developers considering to develop, 11% not sure yet, and 40% will not develop at all.

Android is the first choice, most of Delphi Developers do business application and I see a natural choice on Android, the number of devices out there and the lower price point when compared with iPhone/iOS leads Android more in to the business application development. When we look international market iOS devices would cost at least 60% more then Android devices, different reality from iOS, where we can pay US$200 on an iPhone.

Desktop and N-Tier Development

When asked about desktop development I made three questions, which I believe it’s correlated, here the questions:

Is your company planning to develop new Desktop applications in 2013?

Is your company planning to migrate existing Desktop applications to the Web in 2013?

Which of the following architecture would you use for new applications?

The results showed a clear demand for desktop development, where 73% of the interviewees plans to develop new desktop applications, however when you cross that with the architectural questions, 70% would use N-Tier architecture and only 24% would consider Client/Server.

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There is also a significant number of companies (45%) considering to migrate existing desktop applications to the web, 34% not planning and 21% didn’t decide yet. That information leads to us think about the challenges to migrate legacy applications where you can see all kinds of situation. Talking with developers I see most of the time the following scenarios:

High cost to migrate legacy code, which can’t be financially justifiable

High demand for maintenance and new projects, that doesn’t allow the team to stop or dedicate time to the migration project

The current application is working, no reason to change

And many others

Years ago the software development world moved away rom the traditional Client/Server in to the distributed development. There are so many technologies and architectures for distributed systems out there (SOA, REST, SOAP, WebServices, etc.), which are supported for many languages and IDE’s, but bring the question “Which software vendor has the best implementation and support for distributed applications?”.

Looking forward to see your comments and what’s your choice to build distributed applications?