What’s Trending in Developer Tools?

Digital transformation and the move to the cloud is pushing enterprise development and technology teams to new heights of prowess. The demand for greater software capability, more seamless integration, better data management, and comprehensive oversight means that enterprise software development, developer, and DevOps tools are in high demand. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) are set to streamline businesses and reduce global operating costs by billions. This new status quo is putting enterprise developers and DevOps teams under pressure to discover or create and implement new software to keep their organisations ahead of the transformation curve. Advanced technologies such as high-performance computing (HPC) enabling fast parallel processing, and artificial intelligence (AI), need developer tools such as Intel Parallel Studio XE. A product designed specifically for HPC and AI software developers, enterprise and cloud application developers, and business and data analysts. Intel Parallel Studio XE enables the development of high-performance parallel code in order to accelerate workloads across enterprise, cloud, HPC and AI applications. Intel Parallel Studio XE is a suite of tools that makes it easier to build code using the latest techniques in vectorisation, multithreading, multimode parallelisation, and memory optimisation. Intel argues that HPC and AI development needs a common platform. JetBrains tools are also used by many .NET developers and organisations like Salesforce and even NASA. Its products allow software developers to build faster, creating clean, quality code, and automating development tasks. JetBrains has a focus on development team collaboration to reduce costs and eliminating code issues which can take 30% and more of a developers time. JetBrains polled 7,000 software developers to learn more about the developer ecosystem, with Java and JavaScript as the most popular programming languages, the rate of growth of Go has made it the most promising, but Python is the most studied language. 49% of developers had used Python in the twelve months prior to the study, 61% HTML and CSS, and 56% SQL. Windows is still the prevalent OS with 57% of the developer market questioned, and 60% of developers are working on back-end web development. In terms of tools, JetBrains found 80% of developers used source code collaboration tools, 75% standalone IDEs, 71% lightweight desktop editors, and 45% continuous delivery tools. Other regularly utilised tools included issue trackers, static analysis tools, code review tools, and in-cloud editors. Another example of a popular DevOps tool is JFrog Artifactory, a universal repository manager that enables universal artefact management for DevOps acceleration. JFrog products integrate with almost any development environment, from legacy code to the most recent containers and micro-services. For complete suites of product design, workflow, and collaboration InVision is a digital design platform that can reduce the time to bring digital products to market by 6.5 weeks without reducing quality. A key benefit in a developer sphere where the need to deliver viable products quickly is substantial, especially as the rate of digital transformation and new capabilities accelerates. As per Market Research Future the mobile application development market, worth over $60 billion in 2019, is still growing at a rate of 14% CAGR and is expected to supersede a value of $100 billion by 2022. In the enterprise software market, estimated to be worth $634 billion by the end of 2023, as well as in the consumer software market, there is still demand for desktop as well as cloud software. This all-round software growth leaves room for tools such as Advanced Installer, used for creating application packaging and deployment options such as Windows installation and update sequences. When used for enterprise software development, Advanced Installer has powerful features and can create reliable software installers that can reduce support costs that are incurred due to improper installs. The key to DevOps methodology is an agile, collaborative approach that speeds the time to implementation of software creation and deployment. Yet with cybersecurity critical and threats rising, coupled with the need to shorten product or service time-to-market, rigorous software testing is an absolute must. BrowserStack offers software developers the facility to test applications and websites on over 2,000 devices and browsers. It’s used by the likes of Microsoft and over 25,000 other customers globally and can be incorporated directly into a developer’s technology stack. Another developer toolkit, SmartBear, was named a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Test Automation. It provides user interface (UI), functional, loading and cross-browser testing. SmartBear’s suite incorporates the full range of tools for the software development lifecycle including design, creation, management, and monitoring. Effective integration and growth are vital for software developers and DevOps teams and for successful software creation, launch, and sustainability. Application programming interfaces (APIs) provide functionality and connective tissue. Third-party APIs too, enable distributed and modular alternative software that can be assembled into more complex applications. Tyk is an API and API service management platform that be installed into enterprise infrastructure enabling API accessibility for everyone. The high-performance data analytics market is estimated to reach a value of $149 billion by 2024. This is driven by HPC systems and big data analytics with software collecting and processing billions of items of data. It’s also pushing the need for software tools and software development tools, and analytics platforms to overview both enterprise software systems and the data that is produced. Nevron is a visualisation suite with cross-platform compatibility for developers allowing them to create essential data and performance reporting in the visual format expected. Nevron is available in formats for Windows and Mac development, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), .NET and SharePoint development. Another popular tool, QuickReport, is a set of components and controls that allows branded reports to be designed and previewed. Its functionality can be integrated into many software developments and programs.