Microsoft's Silverlight technology for rich Internet applications is gathering steam among developers in Asia, an Evans Data survey unveiled on Tuesday reveals.

The most recent Evans Asia Pacific Development survey found that 16 percent of Asia Pacific developers employ Silverlight sometimes and an additional 34 percent plan to do so.

Microsoft plans to launch Silverlight 3 and the accompanying Expression Studio 3 toolset on Friday at an event in San Francisco. Version 3 of Silverlight features out-of-browser capabilities for building lightweight experiences for the Web that can run on the desktop. Silverlight is a rival to the more-established Adobe Flash platform.

Also revealed in the survey was that three quarters of Asia Pacific developers are pondering SOA implementations while fewer than 10 percent are currently fully deployed.

In other findings in the Evans survey, more than one in four developers are using cloud services or expect to within six months. While 11.3 percent use cloud services now, an additional 16.4 percent expect to do so within a half year. More than half plan to use them at some time. Transactions were the most likely type of implementations planned for public clouds, which are those outside the firewall. Storage represented the least likely type of cloud implementation.

"The cloud computing value proposition has been more compelling in the APAC region vs. NA (North America) or EMEA (Europe Middle East Africa)," said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data, in a statement released by Evans. "Their primary motivations for adoption have been ease of use/speed to market and the overall economics/cost savings, which relate well to the youngest and most inexperienced developer population where eight of 10 work in small organizations."

The biannual survey queried more than 400 Asia Pacific developers, measuring technology shifts and adoption patterns.  Another finding of the survey was that PayPal is the most commonly used form of online payment system being built into applications, with its use occurring more than three times as much as Google Checkout.