The results of a survey by Evans Data shows that use of the Ruby scripting language has increased by 40% amongst North American software developers during the last year. Fourteen percent of developers in this region use Ruby some part of the time, up from 10% who used it in 2008. Additionally, 20% of developers expect to use it in the coming year.

“The increasing adoption of developers using scripting languages correlates with today’s overall emphasis on web centric applications which have to be highly malleable to rapidly changing market driven requirements,” said John Andrews, President and CEO of Evans Data. “Interestingly, while we see Linux continue to increase as a target platform, this category of development reflects the greatest growth in targeting a non windows target platform”.

The biannual survey of over 400 North American software developers measures scripting language use, 3GL language use such as C++, C#, and Java, platform targeting and migration, and other technology adoption including cloud, web services, SOA, parallel programming and agile development trends. The survey series is now in its eleventh year.

Other highlights from the survey include:

Seventy-five percent of applications developers are considering for the cloud will require audit trails

Sixty percent of North American developers use agile development methods some of the time

Commercial SQL databases are two and a half times more likely to be used as a primary database than open source SQL databases.