User’s Pick IBM Rational As Top Dev Tool Suite

IBM’s Rational tool suite ranked tops in user satisfaction, according to data collected from developers by market researchers in April.

In Evans Data’s annual User’s Choice Software Development Platform survey, IBM’s Rational toolset was rated as the best in six different categories, including application modeling, requirements management, support for remote development, support for frameworks, support for multiple languages, and quality of tech support. It also generated the best overall score and topped eight other major competitors.

The survey taken in April 2011 covered more than 1,200 developers, Evans Data officials said.

Nicely Timed For IBM

Not surprisingly, Microsoft’s Visual Studio toolset took second. However, perhaps a bit unexpectedly, Zend Studio from Zend Technologies came in third. Visual Studio ranked highest in database integration, visual and declarative support, and size and quality of the community, while Zend Studio was first in Web design and development tools, and availability of third party tools.

“Providing developers with a superior development environment and tools is an essential strategic element of technology adoption and directly correlates to the eventual success of platforms and vendors,” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, in a statement. “With Rational, IBM has set the bar very high and continues to raise it as the product line evolves and grows to meet changing demands in the marketplace.”

The news of IBM’s Rational taking the top spot in the Evans Data survey comes just before IBM’s annual Innovate conference, which will run June 5-9 in Orlando, Florida. Innovate is known as The Rational Software Conference, however IBM also tends to focus on how the Rational tools play with the company’s other software platforms and development environments.

Meanwhile, the Evans Data survey, conducted worldwide, asked developers to identify any of the nine top development platforms that they use and then rate eighteen elements of those specific platforms, the company said. A formula was then applied to discover relative rankings across competitors. Others in the survey included JDeveloper, Eclipse, JBoss, MyEclipse, Flash Builder and Delphi.

Evans Data’s User’s Choice series is conducted several times a year and provides competitive user satisfaction scores on technologies such as application servers, software configuration management tools, databases, and developer programmes.