PHP-savvy programmers are more in demand than those with other software programming skills.

"Employers around the world who rely on mission-critical product development and building out their IT infrastructure have spoken. Open Source technology, led by PHP and MySQL, is by far the skillset in highest demand today," explained Odesk CEO, Gary Swart.

According to Odesk, demand for PHP programmers is nearly double that for the next most popular skillset. Indeed, PHP accounts for nearly 20 per cent of all IT jobs posted by businesses.

"PHP is superior to any other coding platform. It's free, flexible, and offers a massive support community," said Nicholas Pregeant, owner of Innovative Web Solutions of New Orleans. "Plus, the extensive Open Source library of proven PHP and MySQL scripts are customisable, portable, and scalable for almost any web application."

PHP, which facilitates the production of dymanic web pages, was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. The cross-platform scripting language runs on web servers, taking PHP code as its input and generating web pages as output. PHP is estimated to have been installed on more than 20 million websites and over 1 million web servers.

PHP supports extensions written in C for additional functionality. Extensions have also been coded to add support for Windows API's, Linux process management, multibyte strings (Unicode) and cURL. X