Survey: Typical SOA Development Takes 3-6 Months

According to a recent survey by Evans Data, more than 40 percent of developers polled who said they were working on service-oriented architectures also said they can finish a typical SOA development in three months.

The Evans Data poll shows that this 40 percent figure represents more than twice as many developers as last year. Indeed, the Santa Cruz, Calif., company’s latest survey also showed that more than 60 percent of all SOA projects now take only six months or less to complete. The results are part of Evans Data’s new 2006 Web Services Development Survey, which the company will release on Dec. 22.Evans Data officials said the results indicate a growth in maturity of Web services and SOA technologies.

“We are now moving from the SOA pilot stage into full live deployments taking advantage of the reuse of frameworks and services thus driving the much improved productivity curve,” said John Andrews, Evans Data’s president, in a statement. “This adoption highlights the proven benefits that both the IT and line of business organizations achieve through their SOA efforts.”

Meanwhile, other findings from the survey of 400 developers are that half of the developers working on Web services are also currently using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) or plan to do so over the next 12 months. This figure is up slightly from 45 percent six months ago.

Moreover, developers said the primary challenge to SOA development and deployment is determining return on investment for SOA followed by getting organizational buy-in.

The survey also showed that in three years, two out of three SOA developers will be running the majority of their applications in managed code.

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These findings and the productivity increases indicated in the findings come as developers are adopting Microsoft’s .Net and Java for SOA development almost equally, with both camps growing. In addition, over the last two years, the total number of companies with more than 40 Web services in production has doubled, and that number is expected to double once again in the next twelve months, Evans Data officials said.

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