Software developers believe developing applications to run on private clouds will become one of their main tasks over the coming year. Out of 500 surveyed, 48.9% said they expect to be doing cloud applications within the year.

The Cloud Development survey is the first by Evans Data, an independent research firm that conducts periodic surveys of developers. A total of 29.7% said they are current working on applications for private cloud environments. Another 19.2% said they expect to be engaged in cloud development within the next 12 months.

The largest group of respondents, 48%, said they think that Java is the best language for developing in the cloud; Microsoft's C# was the number two pick. Evans Data surveys have tended to slant somewhat toward Java developers, since participants self-select or sign up to participate in numbers that are not precisely reflective of what languages are in use throughout the world of programming.

Half of the developers using Amazon's EC2 cloud said they were doing so experimentally or for prototyping an application, not to run a business critical application.

Three-quarters of the developers believed that data deployed in applications running in a public cloud should be backed up somewhere else -- in the data owner's on-premises storage or in a private cloud at a separate location.

Both data recovery and security figured as major concerns in developer comments on using the cloud. A total of 41% said they had no plans to develop applications for the cloud or deploy existing applications to the cloud. Of those already involved in cloud development, a larger total, 30% were developing for private clouds than for public clouds -- 24%.

Of those using cloud facilities, the most frequent function appeared to be for software testing purposes. Cloud environments are good for testing because they can be set and torn down quickly, sometimes at less expense than on-premise facilities.

Of those using cloud facilities to run applications, 49.8% said they were doing so experimentally or for prototyping; 28.6% for non-critical business applications and 21.6% for business critical applications, the survey indicated.

"While developers want to take advantage of the cloud, our research indicates a strong preference for them to favor a cloud related development environment to simply extend their existing technology know-how," said John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data, in announcing the survey results.

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