When in October Brandon Werner (pictured) made his impassioned 'Why Can't Java EE Be More AJAX-like?" plea, 34,526 SYS-CON.com readers read what he had to say. Cincinnati-based Werner enjoined the Java community to "Think AJAX" - by which he meant that, unlike Java, with AJAX you are free to use any backend you want, use any persistence you want, and even implement your own call-backs and improvements. All AJAX is, says Werner, is "a set of extremely important best practices and patterns developers use to create compelling web clients."

"If Java EE is to survive as a platform," Werner wrote, "we have to stop teaching JEE as a set of JCP blessed related technologies, often complicated, as implemented in the Glassfish reference implementation...I believe that the best way to move on to the JEE 5 era and eliminate all the weeping and gnashing of teeth that EJB 1.x and EJB 2.x introduced to developers is to teach JEE as a set of patterns and ideas, abstract from the actual implementations of various providers, and label them as best practices of the enterprise space."

In contrast, he pointed out: -

"AJAX is not a set of any one company’s technologies, and there is not even a 'reference implementation' of it."

Asked by JDJ News Desk about the "Think AJAX" part of Werner's blog posting, the response of Gavin King - inventor of Hibernate & EJB3 spec  response was as follows:

"AJAX exists because there is a standard for it: XmlHttpRequest. If you are really talking about AJAX frameworks, well, this is simply a sign of the immaturity of the whole space. In time successful solutions will emerge and eventually there might be a need to write standards. For now AJAX frameworks are all still basically experimental technology."

"SOA is bigger than Java," Brandon Werner added, in his October piece, "which is why BEA, IBM and the rest aren't even submitting their SOA ideas to the JCP at all."

He continued:

'In a world where we are moving to a SOA style of implementing business processes and modeling business needs into the architecture, we must stop thinking in terms of concrete technology (faster bubble sort, smoother scrolling) and start thinking in terms of patterns and methodologies that best address the problem we are solving.'

Of course, Java's JCP problems aside, the rise and rise of AJAX goes on. At the recent Developer.com Product of the Year Awards for 2007, AJAX dominated the main Technology category with 61% of the votes.

At AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 (East), a SYS-CON Events event being staged in The Roosevelt Hotel in NYC (March 19-21, 2007), there are more speakers, more exhibitors, and more sponsors than for any previous event of its kind. "The AJAX Moment" is widening and deepening, in other words.

Thin, in short, is in.