Study: Leading Retail Sites Slow to Adopt AJAX
"AJAX is arguably the best rich Internet application available to developers right now,
but its complexity and the disruption to traditional development processes (:cell PQA(PSS(seem):)
to be hindering the widespread adoption predicted by many experts,"
How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers
The Business Readiness Rating service is collecting public feedback on its proposal for evaluating
open source code. Eventually, says Wasserman, it will host automated software tools that harvest
statistics from open source project sites that help predict their likelihood of success: the
number
of developers and core developers,
frequency of releases,
support queries and unanswered queries,
and the
number of bugs tracked versus fixed.
A 9-point checklist before considering using open source
- A thriving community - A handful of lead developers, a large body of contributors, and a substantial--or at least motivated--user group offering ideas.
- Disruptive goals - Does something notably better than commercial code. Free isn't enough
- A benevolent dictator - Leader who can inspire and guide developers, asking the right questions and letting only the right code in. It's the job of the benevolent dictator to keep a team together through the long march, to impose discipline, assign work, award praise, and heal rifts created by setbacks.
- Transparency - Decisions are made openly, with threads of discussion, active mailing list, and negative and positive comments aired
- Civility - Strong forums police against personal attacks or niggling issues, focus on big goals
- Documentation - What good's a project that can't be implemented by those outside its development?
- Employed developers - The key developers need to work on it full time.
- A clear license - Some are very business friendly, others clear as mud
- Commercial support - Companies need more than e-mail support from volunteers. Is there a solid company employing people you can call?