With the need of desktop-like functionalities to support Web 2.0 applications, the web development job market is experiencing considerable changes. From increased salary incentives for emerging tech skills to the freelancing effect, we take a look at the market state.

Salary Trends -The 2008 IT Salary Guide published by Robert Half Technology lists a broad range of IT salaries based on U.S data. It reports an average of £38,125 to £54,125 for the ‘Senior Web Developer’ position, which is an increase of 6.6% over this job’s 2007 salary range. The report gets more remarkable as you drill down the different skills and their respective salary increase:

• Java development – 10%
• LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl) – 5%
• AJAX – 5%
• CFML development – 5%
• Visual Basic .NET – 10%
• C# development – 12%

Ranking the different programming languages by annual salaries based on Indeed Salary Search, C++ ranks first, followed by Python, C# and PHP and ASP.NET ranked last.

Programming Languages – To get an overview of jobs based on the most popular programming languages, we’ve used SimplyHired, a job search engine with data derived from millions of jobs indexed over the past few years. Here is a breakdown on the current trends since November 2006:

• Perl jobs decreased 40%
• Python jobs decreased 9%
• PHP jobs increased 35%
• Ruby jobs increased 23%
• ASP jobs decreased 48%
• ASP.NET jobs decreased 31%
• Java jobs decreased 39%
• AJAX jobs increased 77%
• Ruby On Rails jobs increased 238%
• Flash jobs increased 2%

Geographic Trends – The job market differs both in terms of programming languages and salary average in different locations. In large metropolitan areas like Boston, New York and Stamford, the salaries are higher than the national average. In UK for instance, the average salary for a senior developer would be slightly less than the US while being almost 50% less in India.