Students at North Carolina State University are learning to build business applications in the Web 2.0 mold using an IBM incubator project called Project Zero.

Announced last year, Project Zero is a programming framework for rapidly building Web applications. Its pieces include a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP (hypertext preprocessor), two hot dynamic languages, along with APIs (application programming interfaces) for creating REST (representational state transfer) Web services, user interfaces and mashups, according to IBM. It is available as a plug-in for the Eclipse integrated development environment, as well as in a version for developers who prefer to work from the command line.

However, the project has faced some criticism, because although its community-driven model echoes open source, it is not an open-source project. Mark Hanny, vice president of strategic partnerships at IBM, said a commercial version of Project Zero could surface soon.

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