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Open-source software is coming of age. Once pegged as unsupportable and quirky code created by geeks in the wee hours of the morning and considered risky to deploy, open-source software has finally received blessings from mainstream vendors, such as IBM and Oracle, and mainstream programmers deep inside the traditional coding shops of corporate America.

Indeed, open-source tools are now enabling solution providers to build exciting, strategic Web-based applications that can prove quite profitable as corporate customers extend their reach, connect with partners and suppliers, and build their overseas businesses without investing a great deal in software infrastructure. It's an exciting challenge-one that many VARBusiness 500 solution providers are tackling head-on.

"We are seeing more opportunity to wrap our application-development and infrastructure services around our product sales," says Bill Sanders, director of strategic services for Bell Industries' VB169 Tech.logix Group, in Indianapolis. The typical open-source scenario involves an informal group of programmers who have banded together to work on a specific software project-typically software that runs over some Internet protocols and makes use of common Internet applications, such as the Web and e-mail. It doesn't matter whether the code is written by a teen-ager or an experienced programmer. Often, the programmers are located all over the globe and communicate extensively via e-mail and newsgroups.

"We have 75 active developers around the world," says Marc Fleury, a lead developer and founder of the JBoss initiative, which is one of the leading Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application-server development tools. "Open source not only offers the advantage of access to the source code, which makes it easier to fix bugs, but it also makes it easier to develop applications on top [of it]."

But don't be fooled: Building applications that take advantage of Web browsers, Internet infrastructure and TCP/IP protocols isn't easy. New techniques must be learned, such as the ability to wrangle a rich enough user interface out of an ordinary Web browser and make it functional enough to support dynamic applications. Plus, Internet connectivity can vary widely, depending on the time of day and the type of connection, creating other challenges for developers to incorporate into their applications.

Still, developers remain undaunted. "We would not be able to survive without these technologies," says Ben Reytblatt, CEO of solution provider Quadrix Solutions, Piscataway, N.J. "We have been building Web services into our apps for about a year now, and we see this expanding to the point where our Web services will become as important to the apps we build as any of the other really important platforms and technologies. They will become part of any application that we build."

Java: The Heart of It All

Part of the whole open-source arena-some would call it a movement-has to do with Java, the programming language originally developed by Sun that has now become the heart of a whole range of tools and add-on technologies. While Java has had a bad reputation for buggy client-side implementations, the better developers are looking toward server-based Java code as their savior. Java is especially useful for projects that need to be portable among different Windows and Unix server platforms.

"Java is still the standard and is becoming stronger by the day," says Ari Kahn, CTO of Web content-management software vendor FatWire, Mineola, N.Y. "There are so many code libraries, application servers and services, and other supporting infrastructures for application development."

Please read the complete story: http://vb.channelsupersearch.com/news/var/35813.asp