Platform-as-a-service cloud vendors Heroku and Engine Yard have been branching out to accommodate more developers by backing more programming languages.

Objective-C, used for developing Apple iOS applications, climbs to No. 6 in the monthly Tiobe Programming Community index for most popular programming languages, after being ranked at number 8 a year ago. Also posting gains, C# rose to No. 4, a jump of two spots a year ago, while PHP dropped from No. 4 at this time last year to No. 5.

CRM is an application with a long history of open source development, with many projects written the PHP language. However, a Swiss developer has released one of the first open source CRM systems developed with the Django Python framework.

To fill a requirement for flexible content and management and e-commerce, Melbourne-based software engineer Stephen McDonald has released two open source projects built with the Django framework.

A group of high school students will today unveil four alternatives to the popular Facebook social networking service as part of a Sydney University summer school projects, in part sponsored by Google.

SkyMapper, a newly-launched Australian observatory is playing a key role in the Southern Sky Survey project, a five-year initiative to map and study the observable universe from the southern hemisphere. Yet while Skymapper has the potential to find objects as large as Pluto drifting in our outer solar system and quasi-stellar objects on the far edge of the universe, scientists say the project is equally important because it heralds the arrival of a new era in astronomy -- one where researchers can draw on freely available online data about the universe instead of having to wait months, or even years, for a chance to observe the night sky through a billion-dollar physical telescope. The project is also powered by some serious IT and relies heavily on the open source community to run. It will also create one of Australia's largest databases at around 470 terabytes.