According to a recent Evans Data survey, Mac operating systems have surpassed Linux in popularity as a development environment in North America.

The recently released Evans Data North American Development survey showed that although Windows remains overwhelmingly the most popular operating system for development with more than 80 percent of developers using it, Linux has slipped to third place with only 5.6 percent using it as their primary development platform, while 7.9 percent now use Mac OS.

"Apple has made tremendous strides in the last few years with innovative products and technologies." said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, in a statement. "So it's quite reasonable to see developers adopting the Mac and its OS as a development environment. Windows firmly remains king, but developers are obviously attracted to Apple's devices, while at the same time Linux has lost some of its luster after years of only single-digit adoption."

Mac OS has not, however, displaced Linux as a development target. Still more than twice as many developers primarily target Linux as do Mac.

Other highlights from this comprehensive survey of more than 400 professional software developers in North America, conducted June 2011 include that developers believe mobile and cloud development will increase the most in importance over the next three years, followed distantly by open source and plug-in architecture. The DevOps phenomenon will be least important, according to the survey.

The Evans Data survey also showed that almost half (47.3 percent) of North American developers use or expect to use Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME). And Adobe's BlazeDS is being well received in North America with more than one-third of developers using or expecting to use the server-based Java remoting and Web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR applications, the survey said.