For many years, Apache has been the de facto standard for Web site and application deployment. The open-source Web server, which was originally created as "a patchy" version of the original NCSA HTTP server, has become a highly modular, and customizable, piece of software that can handle nearly anything that an Web site might require. Nearly every open-source Web developer used Apache -- except for programmers using the Ruby on Rails framework, for whom Apache ...

Microsoft announced on Friday that it would be joining the Apache Software Foundation, one of the leading organizations in the open-source world. Microsoft became a platinum sponsor of the ASF, which costs $100,000/year and is the highest level of sponsorship that the foundation offers. In a blog posting announcing the sponsorship, Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy and head of its open source software lab, indicated that this demonstrates Microsoft's interest in working ...

There are three parts to a successful open-source project: First, there has to be software. The software doesn't need to be great, but it needs to show some promise, solving a real problem that people have. Secondly, it needs to have an open-source license that encourages participation. There are several dozen sanctioned open-source licenses today, but the GNU General Public License and Berkeley license are two of the most common, because they are well understood ...

If you're a Web developer, it's a pretty good bet that one of your most important tools is Firebug, an open-source debugger for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax that works inside of the open-source Firefox Web browser. Since it was first unveiled several years ago, Firebug has taken the Web-development world by storm, revolutionizing developers' ability to modify, test, and debug Web applications. What is perhaps most amazing is that for much of its life, ...

For years, you could tell the hottest open-source projects by the number of programmers on an e-mail list, or by the number of books published. Increasingly, though, the hottest projects are those around whom service-oriented businesses are being formed. Last week, we saw that PHP company Zend received $7 million. Yesterday, Ruby on Rails hosting company Engine Yard received a $15 million series B round from NEA, Amazon, and Benchmark. This follows an earlier $3.5 ...

Ajax, a programming/design technique that combines JavaScript, asynchronous HTTP connections, XHTML, and CSS, has turned the Web into a true application platform. Before Ajax, submitting a form or clicking a link meant that the entire HTML page needed to be sent from the server, and then redrawn in the browser. Ajax allows for far more selectivity, such that only one part of a page is updated, leaving the rest untouched. Ajax works quite well, and ...