HotGigs has a feature where they collect and aggregate the hourly bill rates of the consultants on their site. Here are the average hourly bill rates for Flex, Flash, and Ruby, surprisingly they have sub-categories for Flash all the way down to Flash Remoting but there’s just one category for Ruby with no Rails sub-category.

For the Rails rate I’d guess that Rails is to Ruby as Flex is to ActionScript. I threw PHP in there as well to mix it up.

ActionScript hourly bill rates
ActionScript bill rate (low): $50.00
ActionScript bill rate (high): $75.00
ActionScript pay rate (low): $32.50
ActionScript pay rate (high): $48.75
Average hourly bill rate: $62.50

Adobe Flex hourly bill rates
Adobe Flex bill rate (low): $75.00
Adobe Flex bill rate (high): $125.00
Adobe Flex pay rate (low): $48.75
Adobe Flex pay rate (high): $81.25
Average hourly bill rate: $100.00

Flash hourly bill rates
Flash bill rate (low): $50.00
Flash bill rate (high): $75.00
Flash pay rate (low): $32.50
Flash pay rate (high): $48.75
Average hourly bill rate: $62.50

Flash Design (no full data but this was the average)
Average hourly bill rate: $50

Flash Remoting hourly bill rates
Flash Remoting bill rate (low): $60.00
Flash Remoting bill rate (high): $80.00
Flash Remoting pay rate (low): $39.00
Flash Remoting pay rate (high): $52.00
Average hourly bill rate: $70.00

Ruby hourly bill rates
Ruby bill rate (low): $75.00
Ruby bill rate (high): $95.00
Ruby pay rate (low): $48.75
Ruby pay rate (high): $61.75
Average hourly bill rate: $85.00

PHP hourly bill rates
PHP bill rate (low): $70.00
PHP bill rate (high): $90.00
PHP pay rate (low): $45.50
PHP pay rate (high): $58.50
Average hourly bill rate: $80.00

Flex had an average hourly bill rate of $70 a couple of months ago so it’s on the move (what recession?), if you’re an ActionScript Developer still doing Flash work get on the Flex train and raise those rates!

The rates seem about right to me (actually remoting seems low), what do you think?

Monkey see monkey do. I’m usually wary of PHP frameworks that are ‘inspired’ by Ruby on Rails but the Akelos folks have done a really good job with their port. They even have a screencast narrated by guy who’s funny accent you can’t quite place :P

Every now and then I get a project that has to be in PHP (usually because of hosting requirements) so it’s nice to have everything laid out in a familiar way.

Looking for some Rails like scaffolding for Flex and PHP? Try clicking the purple eclipse logo at the top left of Flex Builder 3.

You’ll be greeted with a database connection wizard that helps you set up a REST CRUD service, it even builds a mini-app for managing records.

There’s a (well hidden) screen-cast on Adobe labs.

Pretty cool. Even cooler would be a built-in Cairngorm service wizard/generator.

Tip of the hat to Tomo for showing me this.

The Midnight Coders have released A new version of WebORB for PHP. There’s a bunch of new features which equal, if not leap-frog, thos in AMFPHP. Their post runs through the top ten new features, but my favorites are #6 client/server class mapping

Client/server class mapping configuration. Since this is one of the most common tasks when integrating Flex clients with any kind of backend systems, we tried to make it as simple as possible to create client/server class mappings. The Class Mappings section of the ‘Server Configuration’ tab provides an easy-to-use interface to establish class mappings:

and… #7 Tons of examples! A good example is worth pages and pages of documentation, they don’t take too long to create, and they let users get on with getting on.