You wrote: "It's also interesting to note Mac OS X pulling development and deployment numbers several times the platform's supposed market share, although it is puzzling that a greater percent of development happens on a Mac than deployment."
This trend should not be puzzling; just ask one of your Mac-using compatriots. If a business is deploying Java apps running on some variation of Unix on big tin, is it going to be easier to mimic the deployment environment by developing that app on a Unix variant, or on Windows?
Taking it further, how many respondents work in an all-Unix or all-Linux environment? Probably not that many. For integration into a mixed computing environment, OS X is hard to beat. You have MS Office, you have bash.
On top of that, it is generally much easier to configure and use a laptop with OS X than with Linux or one of the *BSDs. Where pay = time spent coding, having a laptop that "just works" is more important than spending the time necessary to configure Linux, et al. to work well on that laptop.
In short, Macs have the best of both worlds, and expediency often triumphs over idealism.
You don't need to sell your editors on the value of Macs, as a check of our author bio's will show. :-)
But here's something to think about. We said that Mac Java development numbers were "several times the platform's supposed market share". That's the part your discussion bolsters: that Macs are nice, they have Office and bash, etc. What we said was "puzzling" was that there were more people saying that they were developing Java on a Mac than people saying they were developing Java for the Mac.
So how does that work? Some possibilities:
Developer writes web app on Mac, deploys to Linux, Solaris, etc. Suggests Macs aren't as popular as app servers
Developer writes client-side (AWT, Swing, or SWT) app on Mac, deploys to Windows, Linux, etc. and not Mac. Does this seriously happen? Amazingly, yes. In fact, I did exactly this at a company with a stringent Windows-only release policy (and no, I wasn't happy about it).
Developers write client-side apps on various platforms, and don't target or support Mac. Why not?
So that's what we find puzzling. Of these hypotheses (and there may be more... please talkback!), I find the first the most plausible.
re: Mac dev vs. deploy
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You don't need to sell your editors on the value of Macs, as a check of our author bio's will show. :-)
But here's something to think about. We said that Mac Java development numbers were "several times the platform's supposed market share". That's the part your discussion bolsters: that Macs are nice, they have Office and bash, etc. What we said was "puzzling" was that there were more people saying that they were developing Java on a Mac than people saying they were developing Java for the Mac.
So how does that work? Some possibilities:
So that's what we find puzzling. Of these hypotheses (and there may be more... please talkback!), I find the first the most plausible.
-Chris