Adobe Systems and Microsoft scored high marks for security among scripting language environment providers, according to a recent survey by Evans Data.

According to Evans Data, Adobe Flex and Microsoft ASP.Net AJAX, previously known by the code name "Atlas," took top honors for security among popular scripting language offerings.

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In the study, titled the "2007 Scripting Languages—Developers Choice Report," Evans Data surveyed more than 400 developers about 12 scripting languages: Ruby, ASP.Net AJAX, Flex, Python, Cold Fusion, PHP, Action Script, XAML, JavaScript, Perl, VB Script and Tcl, the company said.

In the study, Adobe's Flex scored slightly higher than ASP.Net, as respondents pointed out built-in security mechanisms in Flex 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, in a statement. "It's wonderful to see Flex recognized as the security leader."

Click here for eWEEK Labs' review of Flex 2.

Also in a statement, John Andrews, president at Evan Data, said, "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."

Evans Data broke its languages survey up into 13 categories: 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.

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