OStatic

We've done several posts on how open source skills can arm job seekers with valuable differentiation from the rest of the pack, and lots of support for that concept continues to arrive. From working for commercial open source companies to working on open source-focused divisions at big companies such as Google, skills with tools such as PHP, Hadoop, and open source content management system platforms can be really valuable in today's tough job market.

In this post, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert took note of the very favorable trends in the job market for people with Drupal skills. In Elance?s Online Work Index, which analyzes the hot categories for tech jobs posted on its online marketplace, PHP-related jobs held the number one spot in July (as has been true since February). Now, Black Duck software, which maintains a large knowledgebase of trends in open source usage, is out with some notable statistics about which programming languages are showing momentum in open source projects, and how they're being influenced by growth in web applications.

One of the fascinating trends that the Java world has seen in the last few years is the growth of non-Java languages that use the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). After all, if you create a new programming language, you will need to write it for a particular platform. If you want your language to be portable across platforms, you will need to implement versions for each of those platforms. By contrast, if you implement your language on the JVM, then your language will work on any system with a JVM, which is basically everywhere. Four of these languages -- Jython, JRuby, Groovy, and Scala -- are released under open-source licenses, and are increasingly popular choices for programmers who value portability.