That Royal Wedding: agile, fast and cloudy. And that's just the website

Prince William and Kate Middleton. We don't know which one chose Google Apps for the site hosting. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Our first - and last? - bit of Royal Wedding arcana. We've been having a quick read of the Official Royal Wedding site (at http://www.officialroyalwedding2011.org/ - do you think they're planning ahead to Official Royal Wedding 2012? If so it's already been taken).

So - wedding announcement 16 November, website registered on 23 December (they work right up to at Christmas at Clarence House too).

Built by the Reading Room - which got caught in the middle of that furore over the ICO's surprisingly expensive favicon - the Official Wedding Site's terms and conditions make interesting reading, as much as anything because it shows how government (or royal) sites should be built for maximum impact at lowest cost.

Here you go: "The website was designed by Reading Room, implemented by Accenture and hosted by Google using Google Apps."

That sounds like a good example of maximum bang for buck - using Google Apps for the hosting should mean that it's robust enough if tons of people storm the site (in a positive way, obviously). Reading Room is sworn to utter silence over the building and content of the site, although we can conclude a few things about it from the setup: it must be running Python, since that's what you have to run Google Apps site in (generally).

And Margaret Manning, chief executive of Reading Room, who appeared on the Tech Weekly podcast back in March, has previously told us that the arrival of Google Apps and Amazon's S3 (outages notwithstanding) means you can mix rapid development with open source, which is a triple win: it's cheaper, it's faster and it's more robust. "Enterprises used to be nervous about agile development processes and open source, but now they are seeing the benefits," she said. "It allows very fast and efficient development - and cloud hosting for sites that may get large amounts of hits is perfect."

The wedding does offer malware authors new possibilities, security companies are warning. Here's the latest from Imperva, which conducted a rapid poll among visitors to last week's Infosecurity Europe exhibition:
• 38% of security professionals have witnessed the nuptials being used for malvertising
• 34% have seen wedding-related spam
• 20% incidents of search engine poisoning (where wedding-related results have been used to point to malicious pages).

Eset has some examples of how search engine queries can be poisoned - particularly with rogue anti-virus which pretends that your machine is rotten with malware and that what you really need to do is download something which will get rid of it. Don't - it'll only make it worse.

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