James and I are currently in Stuttgart, Germany, talking to a very large US government agency. They are evaluating the use of Drupal for collaboration and communities of practice. Some functionality being talked about includes Jabber integration, and of course all the great functionality of calendaring and location-based information.

What's really great is to find such enthusiasm and interest not only in the concepts of open source -- part of the requirements for this project is that all code has to be released back to Drupal, and they're looking to Bryght to help be a liason to the community -- but also for the principles of distributed systems, loose coupling, and REST-ful web services.

I do have a request to make. The architecture that the Drupal solution is being put up against is a traditional, monolothic enterprise J2EE deployment.

In light of such announcements as IBM's work with Zend and PHP and of course yesterday being the 10 year anniversary of PHP (thanks for bringing this up, Zak), I think it's abundantly clear that PHP and the LAMP stack are great choices for large-scale applications. Heck, even Oracle is teaming up with PHP.

So, does anyone have good examples/white papers/case studies in favour of distributed systems, loose coupling, and so on?

(And if you're anywhere near Stuttgart and want to go for a few weissbiers, drop us a line)