The public cloud is shaping up as the primary development platform this year for many IT professionals. Gaining cloud development skills is a top priority for many of these developers, according to new research from Zend Technologies.

Developers plan to invest most of their time and energy in mobile and API projects in 2012. These developers surveyed will continue to code in a variety of languages according to the Zend Developer Pulse global survey report recently released. Approximately 3,335 participants were surveyed November 2011 and the results are now available. As a developer you may wish to make note of these important trends in the web developer community.

The Zend company is well known among developers for its comprehensive focus on PHP, the programming language that runs on many websites  and various services on the Internet. One example of PHP based website is myITview.com which is a Joomla based web site running on a LAMP stack.

“2012 brings with it escalating requirements for cloud, mobile and social apps,” Zend CEO Andi Gutmans said in a statement.

Here are the major findings of the Zend survey:

1. Approximatley 66% of developers globally will be working on mobile app development projects in the next 12 months. 67% of the developers surveyed said they wanted to improve their mobile app development skills this year.

2. About 50% of developers isaid they would be working on projects in four key areas: cloud technologies, social media integration, analytics and big data processing, and creating APIs. About 46 percent of the developers. 52% of large enterprise developers said they wanted to learn more about cloud application development, and 44% said they wanted to learn more about building big data apps.

3. About 60% of the developers stated they plan to use a public cloud service for their apps this year. Amazon was the most popular option selected at about 30% of the participants.

4. Programmers typically will master several languages in the their careers. The Developer Pulse report reflected that the “new norm among developers is use of multiple languages and rising use of dynamic open source languages,” according to Zend.

The four most commonly used languages are PHP, C, Java and JavaScript. According to the report, around 67 percent of developers spent more than 50% of their time with PHP. 

In addition to PHP, Zend’s developer respondents said they use one or two other languages on a regular basis, with as many as 33 percent of large-enterprise developers using both Java and PHP.

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