Industry Prognosticators Look Towards 2007

Incremental mainstream adoption of Ruby on Rails - Jason Bell
It's going to happen, isn't it? Keep an eye out for Sun's offering of JRuby. Whether this is the death of other open source scripting languages like Groovy remains to be seen. - Jason Bell

A slowdown in the AJAX hype - Jason Bell
I think the shine has worn off. There are some nice applications about but at the end of the day it's a Web page with some very fancy JavaScript.

LAMPers will pick REST- David Heinemeier Hansson
2007 will be the year where LAMPers finally decide to stop being neutral about the WS-* mess and pick the side of REST: the next wave of Web APIs will stop supplying both a SOAP and REST API and just go with the latter.

The AJAX bandwagon will gain even more speed. - Gary Cornell

No Effect from the Open Sourcing Java - Gary Cornell
The open-sourcing of Java will have no effect whatsoever on Java's slow decline in favor of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) and C#.

Red Hat Will Become an Acquisition Target - Mark Hinke
Someone will make a bid on the #1 Linux vendor. Maybe Oracle who has done a number on the leading Linux vendor with Unbreakable Linux will take advantage of Red Hat's near 52-week low...

AJAX grows up - Coach Wei
Which means the following are available and useable: Visual AJAX IDE, Declarative AJAX Framework, adoption of AJAX within less leading-edge enterprises...

JSON without AJAX - John Evdemon
We'll start to see more people using JSON to address the XML bloat problem outside of simple AJAX-based applications. The downside is that this may result in more tightly-coupled applications.

Java Persistence API - Bill Dudney
JPA will bring relational object mapping to the long tail of the market. Early adopters will be wondering what all the hype is because the technology is so old in their eyes.

Server Virtualiation Comes of Age - Brandon Harper
Server virtualization is just getting started, and will really make itself known in the coming year.