(SYS-CON Media)  Adobe Flex and Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX (previously code-named “Atlas”) were rated tops in security when rated by users of these popular languages, according to Evans Data Corporation’s newly released 2007 Scripting Languages – Developers Choice Report. The research is based on developers ranking scripting languages that they use across thirteen distinct attributes. Flex, a J2EE application, scored slightly higher than ASP.NET, touting several built-in security mechanisms that control access to web services, HTTP services and JAVA classes.

“Developers know that strong security is the foundation of great user experiences, and an increasingly important selection criteria for rich Internet application development technology,” said Jeff Whatcott, vice president of marketing at Adobe. “It’s wonderful to see Flex recognized as the security leader.”

John Andrews, President at Evan Data Corp. added, “The feature set used to rank these scripting languages were based on what developers and enterprises indicate as the most important, and these have become even more important given the pervasive market adoption into much more mission critical applications.”

In this recent survey of more than 400 developers, respondents ranked twelve different scripting languages, including Ruby, ASP.NET AJAX, Flex, Python, Cold Fusion, PHP, Action Script, XMAL, Javascript, Perl, VB Script, and Tcl. The thirteen vertical categories the languages were broken into were ease of use, readability, cross-platform, community, availability of tools, performance, client-side scripting, security, web services development, rapid development, memory management, quality of tools, and frameworks.