Ruby use is up 40 per cent amongst North American software developers since 2008, according to a new study from Evans Data.

Despite the jump in popularity, Ruby still occupies a relatively small niche in the developer community as a whole, the company says. Only 14 per cent of developers polled in North America use Ruby at least some of the time, up from 10 per cent in a poll last year.

About 20 per cent, however, told Evans they expect to use Ruby in the coming year.

The market research firm's latest bi-annual Development survey got its figures by polling 400 North American software developers. Evans reckons the popularity of Ruby is spurred by the rise of Ruby on Rails, the open-source framework written in the programming language — and it thinks it is also one reason why Linux continues to grow as a target platform.

"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 Evans Data CEO John Andrews in a statement. "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."

While that's fine and dandy for open source fans, the developer poll also indicates commercial SQL databases are two and a half times more likely to be used as a primary database than open source SQL databases.

Sample pages of the survey can be found here. ®