I'm working with a startup non-profit org. that will be developing
open-source software for government organizations and we are evaluating
current possibilities for web development tools.

My first question here is:  Are these news groups -
comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix and comp.infosystems.www.servers.misc -
a good place to ask for advice on open-source web-development tools?
It looks like they are focused on web servers, such as Apache,
rather than higher-level tools.  But I'm not sure if any of the other
comp.infosystems.www groups is appropriate.  Is there a better group to
ask in?  Is there another comp.* hierarchy I should be looking in?

If these are the right groups, we would be grateful for any advice
or information on available open-source web application servers, content
management systems, and other related web-development tools.  We are
especially interested, of course, in hearing from people who have
experience in particular technologies - hearing positive and negative
aspects of tools.  Also, comparisons of different tools would be very
helpful.

To fill in some more information about what we are looking for: Java and
Java technologies will probably constitute our main development toolset.
We will probably be, at least to start with, developing systems in the
small to medium-sized range.  Because of this, we are assuming that we
will not need a complete J2EE, EJB solution, such as JBoss, at least
not in the beginning.  But we probably will be using the usual OS Java
tools, such as Apache and Tomcat, with Linux as our development and
deployment OS.

We were considering using Zope and Plone (and related tools) for a
while, until we discovered that integrating Zope with Java is not as
straightforward as we had expected.

Based on what we know so far, our main criteria are, in order of
importance:

- open-source and/or free-software tools;
- tools that support a Java/JSP-based platform;
- tools that provide support for small-to-moderate enterprise-level
applications (that is, not large, heavily distributed J2EE systems,
but, nevertheless, systems that are fairly substantial);
- tools that provide at least a fair amount of flexibility with respect
to working with other tools, languages, etc;
- and a toolset that works well for both small, undemanding web
applications and larger, more demanding ones.

The last item is not essential, since for really small apps we could use
something simple and light like mod_php or mod_perl, although being able to
use the same toolset for all of our apps would probably be an advantage.

Also - and this is my current bias and it may not be necessary, but -
something that provides some support for web-services development would
be nice.

I apologize for not being more informed about such technologies so that I
can give a better idea about what we're looking for.  I'm hoping to learn a
lot more as we go along, but to start with, I'm not as knowledgeable as
I could be.


Thanks very much!

--
Jim Cochrane; jtc@dimensional.com
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