A recent study by Evans Data Corp., a Santa Cruz, CA-based researcher, showed that only 8.7 percent of developers in North America currently are using a cloud service as a development environment, although an additional 18 percent plan to do so in the next year.

Survey results were based on interviews with 500 developers in North America. The study is part of a series Evans conducts worldwide twice yearly on topics such as language and platform use, web services and services-oriented architecture, cloud computing, high performance computing, and development tools and methodologies.

The research findings indicated that use of the Python scripting language by developers has increased by 45 percent in the last year and a half, a boost Evans attributed to Google's influence and cloud computing's potential.

Evans said that only about 13 percent of developers used Python before Google unveiled its App Engine in the Spring of 2008, which, at the time only supported Python, but that figure has risen to more than 20 percent now.

"Python has been around since 1989 but never had many users until recently," said Janel Garvin, Evans Data chief executive.

"This adoption change illustrates the power of Google and the promise of cloud computing on which Google's App Engine depends. As the computing landscape evolves with the cloud, so will the adoption of surrounding technologies, as we see here."

The study also revealed that Agile is the most commonly used programming model in use today in North America, and that corporate priority is the single most inhibiting factor in the adoption and implementation of service-oriented architecture.