Washington state is the toughest recruiting market for companies looking for agile developers, according to staffing and recruiting agency Yoh … which makes it the best place to be looking for a job. California is not far behind, with San Francisco being the city with the highest ration of open jobs to job-seekers in the agile market.

Yoh and jobs site CareerBuilder say that the imbalance is resulting in impressive earning opportunities for Java developers, web developers, project managers, business analysts, and .Net developers. Agile developers are getting average salaries of $110,781 — and a 90th percentile salary in the $160,000 to 170,000 range — as startups, development shops, and established enterprises such as Microsoft, IBM, and Northrop Grumman compete for scarce talent.

The states with the most demand include:

• Washington
• Oregon
• California
• Utah
• Minnesota
• New York
• Massachusetts

The cities with the most talent, however, have only a partial overlap — which means that developers who are willing to move could see impressive income gains.

• San Jose
• Chicago
• New York
• Houston
• Atlanta
• Austin
• Dallas

Here’s the full infographic:

photo credit: Tess Aquarium via photopin cc

The infographic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on work by Yoh at www.agiletalentstudy.com.

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A certain kind of developer loves to hate on PHP. They are really going to hate where PHP’s custodians are taking it next.

PHP was created by Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. In 1997, Israeli programmers Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski rewrote the parser, creating the base for PHP 3. By 1999, they had built the Zend Engine, which is still the interpreter for PHP.

Update October 18: Andi Gutmans just gave us more details about where PHP is going in mobile.

Gutmans and Suraski continued their partnership with Zend Technologies, a commercial entity that creates add-on products and services for PHP developers, particularly developers in the enterprise.

Today, after multiple massive iterations to the codebase, 35 percent of web traffic is handled by PHP, says Gutmans. Wikipedia says 75 percent of websites use PHP. Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and Photobucket are all built in PHP. WordPress, the most popular blogging platform in the world, runs on PHP and probably accounts for half of that 35 percent. Most of the other major content management systems, such as Drupal and Joomla, are also built in PHP.

No respect?

Still, the language can’t seem to get any respect and has been derided for years by programmers coding in C, Java, .NET, Python, or Ruby. In terms of trends, PHP as a search term has been dropping for years, and the mobile app revolution has led to the revival of Objective-C and Java.

So is the programming language that powers so much of the web disappearing gently into the night?

Not if Gutmans has anything to say about it. VentureBeat talked to him about PHP and the future, and he’s more bullish than ever, especially when it comes to the mobile-focused ace up his sleeve.

Riding the U.S.S. Enterprise

“All dynamic languages are gaining share from Java and .NET right now,” says Gutmans. “We’re getting a lot of benefit.”

Source: Wikipedia

Andi Gutmans

So the noise around trendier technologies like Ruby on Rails or Node.js doesn’t especially bother him. Mindshare is nice, of course, but market share is nicer. And market share is what Gutmans is focused on, especially in the enterprise.

“From a maturity point of view,” Gutmans told me, “I don’t think any other dynamic language right now has the full tool set. Our competition is Java and .NET … never with other dynamic languages.”

While he likes what Ruby on Rails is doing, and thinks there are some things there that PHP can learn and grow from, Gutmans points to PHP’s massive support in packaged solutions like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento.

“We’re better off than we were eight years ago … today we’re the only ones who have really hit the mainstream enterprise,” says Gutmans. “We do believe that the momentum and the size of PHP will continue. We don’t see it slowing down right now.”

Gutmans speaks with the enthusiasm of a founder; of course, there are other companies catering to the PHP-related needs of the enterprise. But Zend remains one of the biggest and best-known, especially due to its provenance.

And he’s got a point: Two-thirds of developers in a recent study reported spending half their time in PHP. And in a recent study by Rails developer Marc Gayle, half of all developer job postings on Craigslist call for PHP developers. When I talked to Gayle, he surmised the reason might be PHP’s super-popular content management systems.

“I think that is skewing the results,” he said. “But I can’t be sure.”

And a mysterious mobile story, coming soon

When it comes to mobile apps, Gutmans sides with the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich in a firmly held belief that the web and web languages will eventually catch up and win out over native stacks.

But, he hinted to me, PHP and Zend will be providing client-side app-enabling tools.

Gutmans declined to comment further, saying he would only announce the full details at Zend’s conference in late October. However, it sounds like PHP will have a mobile app story of some sort, in spite of being the web’s predominant server-side language.

What that looks like and how it will be distributed is still mysterious. But a strong mobile story, says Gutmans, will only help PHP continue to grow.

It’s hard to argue with that.

photo credit: Red Bonzai

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This post is sponsored by Intel.

Semiconductor giant Intel has a new app store, called AppUp. It’s a market for apps that run on netbooks, tablets, computers, and other devices that support Intel’s latest low-power processors.

At Intel’s invitation, we tested AppUp by porting a beta version of our Windows Phone 7 application to the store. It made it very straightforward to port a mobile app to the Windows desktop.

The procedure for submitting the application was pretty simple. You download the library for whatever platform you’re using to write the app (in this case it was .NET), sign up for a developer account to get a special keycode, put that keycode into your code, and compile. Then it’s a matter of submitting that compiled code to the AppUp store for review.

As a developer, I especially liked being able to invite other people to review the app (before it went live on the AppUp store) by sending them an email from within the submission process.

But there are still a few bugs. For example, we had to remove the application from our computer first before we could test how the application loaded from the store. But that’s an experience that developers alone will face, and end users wouldn’t have to go through, since only an app’s developer is likely to have the app already and still be wanting to download it.

The AppUp store doesn’t carry apps for all devices, just those that run on Windows PCs and Intel’s low-power Atom processor, which can be found in many netbooks and may soon find its way into mobile phones and even appliances. For instance, Intel demonstrated an Internet-connected treadmill at the Intel Developer Forum last year, so nothing’s out of the question here. The company also showed a racing bike that streamed information live to a pit crew and interactive advertisements and signs. Intel says the possibilities are endless, and they probably are — although I have to wonder if the same app can really run on such diverse devices. Right now, only computers, netbooks and tablet computers carrying the Atom chip can download these apps.

The application we developed was a pretty simple RSS reader, now available on the Windows Mobile 7 store. But if you are curious and you have an Atom-powered device or you’re running a Windows machine, you can download it from AppUp here. Keep in mind this is not a webpage, but an application you install on your device first before you can install any apps.

Below is the final result, showing how the app looks on on a PC. For a rapidly-done port from Windows Phone 7, it’s not bad.

Small and medium-sized companies looking to bring their business operations to the cloud but lacking the technical knowledge or resources to do it themselves may have just found a friend in new startup CloudBasic, which is unveiling a tool to move business operations from local servers to Internet-hosted services today at the DEMO conference in Silicon Valley.

The company claims it can help businesses to build, deploy and customize applications easier and more efficiently than existing cloud-enabled tools.

CloudBasic’s tool, developed using Microsoft’s .Net programming framework, helps companies move key elements of their day-to-day computing, such as Excel spreadsheets, to Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud hosting service. The company’s tools target nontechnical users. A tool dubbed CloudBasic AppSheets allows the user to create applications based on existing spreadsheet designs, in addition to mirroring existing references and calculations.

While the company appears to not have much competition in its Microsoft-centric niche, it does have several rivals focusing on Java, a programming framework now controlled by Microsoft rival Oracle. They include VMForce, a joint project from online-software provider Salesforce.com and virtualization software vendor VMware, as well as LongJump, which provides a platform for software-as-a-service offerings.

The Irvine, California-based company, founded in 2008 and privately funded to date, has signed up several customers, including an oil and gas company and manufacturing and logistics operations.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693