Rational and Happy: IBM Wins Evans' Development Tool Survey Again

Published: June 23, 2009

by Alex Woodie

IBM's Rational products are happier with their integrated development environments (IDEs) than customers of other development toolmakers, including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and a handful of other vendors, according to a new report from Evans Data. It was the second straight victory in the annual survey for IBM's Rational tools, and the third in four years.

For the last four years, Evans Data has surveyed scores of developers across the land to get an idea of what they're working on, what tools they like, and what they don't like. Evans Data used to call this its "IDE study." However, since most of the developers were using tools that are not properly classified as IDEs, but range from architecting and development to testing and deployment, the name of the survey had to change, so it's just called the "User's Choice: Software Development Platform" survey today.

The 2009 survey involved more than 1,200 developers and eight different development suites, including Eclipse, Delphi, Rational Development Tools Suite, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, NetBeans, JDeveloper, and Sun Studio. Evans Data asked the developers to rank the suites across 18 different attributes, including basic tools supplied, support for remote development, visual tools and declarative support, quality of tech support, documentation, application modeling tools, test tools, support for parallel programming, and more.

Here are the rankings, according to Evan's report:

1. IBM Rational Application Developer
2. Microsoft Visual Studio
3. NetBeans
4. Oracle JDeveloper
5. Sun Sun Studio
6. CodeGear Delphi
7. JetBrains IntelliJ
8. Eclipse

IBM's Rational Tools Suite is an "extensive and powerful line of products," Evans Data says in its report. "It is impressive for its quality and the comprehensive nature of the component offerings, and users clearly appreciate it." It also ranked very well for the quality of its modeling tools, the Web development capabilities, and technical support, according to Evans Data.

IBM keeps winning because it focuses on making "software delivery a core business process that must be continuously made more effective," says Evans Data president and CEO, John Andrews. "The robust development environment and the rich assortment of tools that are provided sets a standard of excellence in development tools as evidenced by its users overall satisfaction."

Users can download the 40-page report at www.evansdata.com.

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