So, in what's become an ongoing tradition, this is the time of year when I peer into the patented Ted Neward Crystal Ball (TM) (operators are standing by!), see what it tells me about technology trends and ideas for the coming year, and report them to you. The usual disclaimers apply, meaning I'm not getting any sort of endorsement deals to mention anybody's technology here, I'm not speaking for anybody but myself in this, and so on. And, in order to prove that I'm not an analyst group like Forrester or Burton or any of those other yahoos, in a separate post, I'll look over my predictions for 2006 and see how they panned out, thus proving that the patented Ted Neward Crystal Ball (TM) is just as capable of mistakes as any other crystal ball of course, right all the time. :-) 2006 was an interesting year, in that a lot of interesting things happened this year for developers. For the .NET crowd, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 finally became widely available to them (yes, it shipped in 2005 but it took a bit for it to percolate through the community), and NetFX 3 (aka .NET 3.0, aka Indigo/Avalon/Workflow) shipped in Q4, not to mention Vista itself, meaning there was all kinds of new stuff to play with. For the Java crowd, Spring 2.0 shipped, Geronimo 1.0 shipped, and Sun decided to finally open the doors on the JDK (apparently not realizing that a lot of us had already slipped in the back way through the doors marked "SCSL license" and "JRL license" since JDK 1.2...). Meanwhile, Ruby continued to amaze those who'd never seen a dynamic/scripting language before, and Rails continued to amaze developers who'd never seen a VB demo before. More WS-* specs shipped, people started talking about JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), RSS/Atom continued to draw attention in droves, and marketing guys looked for all kinds of places they could hang the Tim O'Reilly-inspired "Web 2.0" meme anywhere they could. And yet, through it all, developers somehow ignored the noise and kept working. Without further ado... General: Analysts will call 2007 the Year of the {Something} , where I bet that {Something} will be either "ESB" or "SOA". They will predict that companies adopting {Something} will save millions, if not billions, if only they rush to implement it now. They will tag this with a probability of .8 in order to CYA in case {Something} doesn't pan out. (Yes, I've read far too many of these reports--I'm personally convinced that each of the analyst companies has a template Read More...