Zend Technologies has released its annual Zend Developer Pulse 2013 Survey results which was conducted among a group of around 5000 developers worldwide. According to official sources, the main aim of the survey is to investigate some of the key factors that affect the ability of companies to deliver customer engagement and mobile friendly applications.
According to the survey results, around 91% of developers are working on mobile applications in 2013 when compared to 66% in 2012. As many as 91% of independent developers, companies with strength of 2-100 employees and 1001-5000 employees intend to work on mobile apps in 2013 in addition to the fact that 90% of developers are from companies with 100-1000 employees and 83% from companies with over 5000+ employees.
While 59% of survey respondents preferred Geo-location support capability for their applications, 45% opted for client/server data mapping. However, 44% of developers voted for native push notifications and 39% prefers API versioning. However, only 37% opted for interoperability with social platforms for their mobile apps.
Meanwhile, 79% of survey respondents preferred HTML5 and other web technologies for content delivery and services for the mobile audience in 2013. Whiloe 33% opted for a combination of web and native apps, 26% preferred Objective C and Java. Only 12% are unaware about any technology but still they are willing to deliver content for the mobile audience.
Nearly 87% of developers face delays in rolling out the code to production. While analyzing the results, Zend product team noted that 41% of developers rate inconsistent environments between development, testing and production as a reason for the delay.
As many as 27% feel the delay is mainly due to lack of automation in the development process. While 15% of respondents rated lack of collaboration with operations, 9% feel that they doesn't have access to the production environment.
Only 38% of developers from small to mid size companies with less than 100 employees are automating the application deployment process. The rest of the respondents, 42% are employed in large companies with staff strength of over 1000+ employees.
Meanwhile, 37% of developers voted that they work more to add new functionalities to the existing apps and spend only little time to resolve problems. Nearly, 26% of respondents devote half percentages for problem resolution and to add new functionalities and nearly 21% of developers spend most of the time (90%) to add new functionalities.
As many as 91% of developers who work in companies with staff capacity ranging from 100-5000 employees need to work late on a weekend, holiday or during vacation to fix an emergency problem which cropped up in their apps after it was publicly released. Nearly 68% of developers prefer to work on public cloud as per the results of the 2013 survey when compared to 61% in 2012.
Moreover, out of 3260 enterprise, SMB and independent developers, 51% of respondents prefer to make use of Amazon Web Services as their cloud development platform. Only 11% voted for Windows Azure and Red Hat OpenShift platforms followed by 6% for IBM SmartCloud.