OK, time to face the music and look back at my predictions from last year: The hype surrounding Ajax will slowly fade, as people come to realize that there's really nothing new here, just that DHTML is cool again. As Dion points out , Ajax will become a toolbox that you use in web development without thinking that "I am doing Ajax". Just as we don't think about "doing HTML" vs "doing DOM". Well, much as I might have wanted this to take place, it doesn't seem to have happened--Ajax is as much a buzzword (if not more so) than it was in 2005. In fact, it now seems to have grown to the same buzzwordy status as "Web 2.0", in that we're starting to lose sight of it as its acronym originally defined it to be: Asynchronous Javascript And XML. Now people are talking about using JSON, about using it synchronously, and... hey, it's just a matter of time before somebody points out the flaws in Javascript and starts suggesting other dynamic languages for the browser.... The release of EJB 3 may actually start people thinking about EJB again, but hopefully this time in a more pragmatic and less hype-driven fashion. (Yes, EJB does have its place in the world, folks--it's just a much smaller place than most of the EJB vendors and book authors wanted it to be.) Hah. Fat chance. Though the EJB-bashing wave has slipped to an all-time low, it seems, it's still ready to rear its ugly head any time somebody suggests that there might be something about EJB that doesn't suck. Still, the luster is starting to wear off on Spring, which means that (a) people are starting to look at it critically, rather than taking it for granted as a media darling, and (b) people will start to re-evaluate EJB as a viable technology rather than just demonize it. Maybe. Vista will be slipped to 2007, despite Microsoft's best efforts. In the meantime, however, WinFX (which is effectively .NET 3.0) will ship, and people will discover that Workflow (WWF) is by far the more interesting of the WPF/WCF/WWF triplet. Notice that I don't say "powerful" or "important", but "interesting". Here we go: did Vista ship, or not? Officially, Vista was released to manufacturing (RTM'ed), but it's not available to consumers yet, and won't be until later this month or next. WinFX... er, I mean .NET 3.0... er, I mean NetFX3... whatever... shipped at the same time Vista did, though, and developers in the .NET space are beginning to hear more about this thing called "Workflow". It's still a mystery to most, I think, but then Read More...