Even in a recession some companies build custom in-house applications for legitimate reasons(eg drug development pipelines at life sciences companies, which I'm currently working on).
For custom web apps, especially apps that need to provide desktop-like functionality in a browser, you should consider SmartGWT.
1) LGPL, so free for use inside closed-source, commercial applications
2) Ajax-based, so you're not buying into a proprietary platform like Silverlight or Flex
3) based on Google Web Toolkit, so you write your applications in Java in a model similar to Java Swing. You can use your existing skills and existing people instead of trying to hire Flex or Ajax experts, who are hard to find even in this recession
4) really suited to enterprise apps, eg, it's not just pretty widgets that leave all the data handling up to you. The concept of CRUD operations on data is deeply built into it the framework, so master-detail, many-to-many assignment, and similar recurring interactions from enterprise applications are really easy:
5) commercially supported (by Isomorphic Software) if you need a throat to choke, or want the enterprise version some day (additional tools, pre-built Hibernate integration, etc)
If standards-policing were applied to normal web content, many AJAX interactions would potentially be outlawed, eg, Google maps.
Also consider that sometimes you have to violate a standard to allow backward compatibility with broken browsers.
Of course, it all comes down to how it's applied. If they are just trying to frighten management into some level of checking as to whether standards are being followed, great. Yanking registrations for carefully considered violations of standards would probably result in people putting up standards-compliant redirects to other domains:)
Slashdot Mirror
Even in a recession some companies build custom in-house applications for legitimate reasons(eg drug development pipelines at life sciences companies, which I'm currently working on).
For custom web apps, especially apps that need to provide desktop-like functionality in a browser, you should consider SmartGWT.
Google Code project:
http://code.google.com/p/smartgwt/
SmartGWT is:
1) LGPL, so free for use inside closed-source, commercial applications
2) Ajax-based, so you're not buying into a proprietary platform like Silverlight or Flex
3) based on Google Web Toolkit, so you write your applications in Java in a model similar to Java Swing. You can use your existing skills and existing people instead of trying to hire Flex or Ajax experts, who are hard to find even in this recession
4) really suited to enterprise apps, eg, it's not just pretty widgets that leave all the data handling up to you. The concept of CRUD operations on data is deeply built into it the framework, so master-detail, many-to-many assignment, and similar recurring interactions from enterprise applications are really easy:
http://www.jroller.com/sjivan/entry/smartgwt_1_0_released
5) commercially supported (by Isomorphic Software) if you need a throat to choke, or want the enterprise version some day (additional tools, pre-built Hibernate integration, etc)
Demos:
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/
If standards-policing were applied to normal web content, many AJAX interactions would potentially be outlawed, eg, Google maps. Also consider that sometimes you have to violate a standard to allow backward compatibility with broken browsers. Of course, it all comes down to how it's applied. If they are just trying to frighten management into some level of checking as to whether standards are being followed, great. Yanking registrations for carefully considered violations of standards would probably result in people putting up standards-compliant redirects to other domains :)