Google hosting service

Google has announced pricing for its App Engine service for web application hosting, offering a free entry level service and then charging for storage of more than 500MB of data. Read More

A Java answer to Mambo/Joomla/Drupal?

dotCMS recently released version 1.6, a mature and actively developed open source wCMS written entirely in Java. dotCMS is easy for web developers to grok, provides total flexibility in template design/content delivery and uses an architecture that is extendable and developer friendly. It was even runner up in PacktPub's most promising new open source CMS awards. Why hasn’t anyone in the Java community heard of it? [Editor's note: because we have?]

I often see posts asking about a Java equivalent of the popular PHP CMSes like Mambo, Joomla or Drupal. Java shops are looking for a web management solution that marry familiar technologies and architecture with ease of use. These shops need a solution that can be integrated with legacy and enterprise systems. And while there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of open source php+MySQL CMS solutions, there are far fewer true Java CMS options. Read More

Learn about the server-side capabilities of OpenOffice.org

As functionality traditionally associated with desktop applications moves to the Web, developers are looking for new ways to handle that computational heavy lifting on the server side. But if you need to create a Web-based application that behaves like an office suite, there's no need to reinvent the wheel: the open source OpenOffice.org suite can actually serve as the powerhouse behind a Web application. In this article, you'll learn how to combine OpenOffice.org and Dojo to create a simple Ajax-based spreadsheet application much like Google Spreadsheets. Read More

25% of web projects over budget

A quarter of web projects fail to meet their budgets, and 31 percent are delivered late, according to a new report.

The main factors affecting projects are frequently changing requirements, too many stakeholders having a say in the matter, and not enough budget or time being allocated, the report said.

Some 21 percent of projects fail to meet stakeholder requirements, according to a survey of 100 IT managers and directors, conducted by Ruby on Rails software developer New Bamboo.

About half of web projects are run by in-house development teams, and 28 percent are outsourced to third parties, the survey found.

Damien Tanner, co-founder of New Bamboo, said it was critical businesses did not accept failings, even in the development processes for smaller projects.

“The end goal is to deliver business value - yet rigid requirements make it difficult to react to the changes that inevitably occur as knowledge and environments evolve,” he said. “Requirements that have been omitted are generally picked up late in the process - by which time they are awkward and costly to implement.”

What's more, failings were set to become more prominent as businesses attempted to develop complex projects such as social networking, e-commence and web 2.0 sites, the survey concluded. Read More