Google Sites - easy project web sites

I'm working with my wife to develop a web site for her business, FolkertsFotografie. Currently, it is a Smug Mug site. She isn't a fan of selling images via shopping carts, so SmugMug is not a special advantage. I'm wanting to learn about Google AppEngine, so we set up a 'project' to make this happen.

This is where Google Sites fits in. I wanted to organize all of the brainstorming, designing and so forth. Google Sites makes it easy. See for yourself at Fotositeproject. There is easy integration with a host of Google tools, such as Google Docs, Calendar, Groups, Analytics and Webmaster Tools. Plus, I can rest knowing that I have offsite backup of everything and I do not have to worry about keeping the servers running 24/7.

Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools gives me as much monitoring data as my employer gets from IT. But unlike me, Google provides IT services for free.

Grails: By the numbers

Everybody likes to talk about highly productive environments, but numbers are notoriously hard to come by. This makes alterlab's ALTERthoughts Blog, entitled Grails vs. Rails especially interesting. Using Java J2EE as a base, both Ruby on Rails and Grails were found to be twice as productive. Grails beat Rails, but by a margin so slim it seems a dead heat.