Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) was the rage at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas, as keynoters and panelist offered predictions and expectations for the future of development on the Java platform. Cedric Beust, an engineer at Google, said, "I think all the pieces are there on the server side. But I think we'll get a whole new ecosystem around Ajax. It's like a bad cold. More and more people are coming to this thing and we have a whole new excitement for Web sites we never had before, with things like mashups."

Beust, who was invited onstage by Geir Magnusson, vice president of products at IBM's Gluecode division and also a director of the Apache Software Foundation, as part of Magnusson's keynote, described Ajax as "SOA (service oriented architecture) for the client. We're trying to pick up several services and put them on the client."

James Strachan, chief architect and co-founder of LogicBlaze, said, "Ajax is going to make a huge difference on how we build Web apps. Ajax and POJOs (plain old java objects) are the two biggies for building Web apps." Patrick Linskey, an engineer at BEA Systems and former chief technology officer at SolarMetric (which was acquired by BEA) predicted that "somebody will come up with a meaningful way to wire up a server-side Ajax framework with a non-browser-based client-side app."

However, one member of the audience objected to the Ajax hype, as he called it. In fact, an impromptu poll of attendees showed that 51 per cent of attendees said they thought Ajax was hype, while 49 per cent said they thought it was hot. However, one audience member said he believes "you'll see DTOs or dumb transfer objects. I think you'll see all kinds of bad decisions made going too far with Ajax."

Meanwhile, Beust said, "Writing Ajax applications is a lot more challenging than writing client applications — mainly because of the tools — but it's worth it. We're definitely seeing layers on top of Ajax. It's coming. There are plenty of frameworks that do that now and we're going to keep building on that."

Hani Suleiman, chief technology officer of Formicary, said he believes "Java EE (enterprise edition) 5 will bring back people who are scarred, wounded and saddened by J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) as a whole. It has a lot more pleasant view and a natural programmer style."