Recently, we covered research showing that nearly half of open source developers are focused on applications for delivery in the cloud. Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are increasingly either employing open source or are built entirely on it. And all of this adds up to an increasing premium on web development skills and good tools for web development in the open source community. The good news is that there are many  open source tools to help you with your web project, and given the costs of web development environments and the like, they can save you a lot of money. Here are over 15 good examples of tools and tutorials, with a few that we've covered before appended at the end, in case you missed them.

Now that Sourceforge.net has announced the finalists in its Community Choice Awards for best open source applications in various categories, I find a number of my favorite applications missing from the list. Don't get me wrong--this time around, Sourceforge allowed the community to vote, so I don't question how the finalists were arrived at. I just wish a few applications that are near and dear to me got some recognition. Matt Asay already weighed in with his ideas on which applications are missing. Here are a few non-finalists that I wish were finalists.

Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are increasingly either employing open source or are built entirely on it, a la SugarCRM. Meanwhile, there continue to be many opportunities for open source Web 2.0 and e-commerce applications to grow. If you're collaborating on any open source project that requires web application development, here are over twelve free resources to help you--many of them open source themselves.