In many ways, the newcomer to programming who’s aiming at web or mobile development has a much better time of it today. This is because whilst there are many, many languages to choose from, they have much more in common than languages of the past. Learn ActionScript, for example, and you’re half way there with C#, PHP and JavaScript, as their basic constructs are identical.

But the real value you, as a web developer, can bring to a project is specialist skill. Whilst every good PHP developer understands the basics of C#, no web project can be completed without in-depth knowledge, and this takes time and lots and lots of practice to develop. It’s a huge investment so the choice of which language to specialise in is also critical, at least in the short- to medium-term.

If you’re aiming to develop your own web applications, you can choose whichever language flies your kite. I develop in PHP, JavaScript/jQuery and Flex/Flash Builder because I like them. PHP is my absolute favourite, and I tend to use that alongside jQuery unless I need the super-rich application features that only Flex/Flash can deliver. My brother, on the other hand, is a massive fan of C# and either language is perfectly capable of creating sophisticated web applications.

If you want to hire yourself out you need to make a more pragmatic choice about which development tool to specialise in and one way to do this is to look at the demand for each. According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index for April 2010, the venerable trinity of C, Java and C++ are the most widely used and requested programming languages. This is mainly because of the huge quantity of legacy code that needs to be managed within large corporations. PHP is the top web scripting language with C# around half of PHP’s level and Python and Perl next. Objective-C, the language used for creating iPhone applications, still only accounts for a tiny fraction of the programming market but is massively on the rise.

So, for web development, PHP is the most popular language (note, I did not say “best”). That’s all very well but I rather suspect that there are more programmers working in PHP than any other development language, which means the competition is huge. We need to know the ratio between popularity and competition.

I went to freelance recruitment site Guru.com and, for each language, found out the number of projects posted for each of the common web and mobile platform development languages. I then noted how many freelancers/companies offered each language. By dividing one into the other, we end up with a rough idea of how competitive the market for expertise in each language is. For example, when I checked there were 151 PHP projects on Guru and 7,769 providers. This means that there are 51.45 providers for each job.

Here’s the full list:

What leaps out immediately is that the competition ratio for mobile development is much lower than for web development, and within that Android development is almost twice as attractive a market as iPhone development.

Looking at the web development languages, it looks as though Flash, Python and Ruby development are markets that are saturated with developers chasing relatively few projects. PHP and ASP (which includes ASP and ASPX) are neck-and-neck but the head and shoulders winners are Flex and Silverlight. Whilst there are relatively few projects, there are also few developers.

So which should you choose? Looking at these ratios, it seems to me that choosing either PHP or ASP development with Visual Studio for creating standard web applications is a good initial approach. PHP has the advantage of being free to install and develop for (there are plenty of free IDEs) whereas skills developed in C#, for example, are also transferrable into desktop development. The other benefit of developing in the Visual Studio environment is that adding Flash-like functionality is simply a matter of extending your existing C# skills so that they use the Silverlight player.

From the purely commercial point of view (and if you assume that Silverlight will, eventually, succeed as a technology in becoming as ubiquitous as Flash Player) the Visual Studio approach has a lot going for it: C# becomes a single language that can be used on the desktop, for creating standard .aspx web applications and for developing Silverlight applications.

For me, however, PHP is unbeatable when it comes to productivity, and Flash Player is way ahead in terms of browser installations so, at least for now, I’ll be sticking to this combination. My advice to a newcomer to programming, however, would probably be to download Visual Studio 2010 Express and try C# for size – it may well, finally, be the future Microsoft always intended it to be.

On the other hand, with the forthcoming release of Adobe Air for Android and the low competition level for Android development, Flex has suddenly become a very credible development environment for that platform. You pays your money…

Remarkably, phpDesigner is the work of one man, Michael Pham from Denmark who’s put it together (perhaps even more remarkably) in Delphi. phpDesigner has lots of productivity tools designed to make coding more efficient, it incorporates tools for editing related technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript and is one of the few tools that, through its excellent syntax tools, built in manuals and code snippets, helps newcomers to learn PHP.

And perhaps the best news is the price (less than forty quid including VAT). There’s a trial version available at http://www.mpsoftware.dk and the product is being actively developed with a beta version currently downloadable for all registered users.

It’s not often that I come across a piece of software like this that blows me away with its quality and value. I’ve been struggling with Zend’s reasonably featured but unresponsive products and had switched to the (also excellent) Ultraedit but phpDesigner looks like being my IDE of choice, at least for now.

So, when should they be used?

A Stored Procedure is, as its name suggests, a series of SQL statements saved for use later, sort of like an old fashioned .bat Batch file on steroids. They’re particularly useful where you have a complex sequence of actions that never changes: you can get it right once and then run it with much lower overheads in future.

I’ve also heard claims that Stored Procedures improve security against SQL Injection but it’s hard to see why where dynamic data is concerned and, after all, PHP includes mysql_real_escape_string which protects against this form of attack.

So, it seems to me that Stored Procedures would be useful for busy sites with repetitive actions (for example interfacing a shopping cart with a stock management system) but do they have uses for more typical web applications? Or would you suggest that they should be used for every SQL query?

I really don’t know where the line should be drawn: at the extremes it’s pretty clear but the line is extremely fuzzy. Any thoughts?