In keeping with tradition, Ted Neward has made 14 tech predictions for 2006 and even a few that extend into 2007. In the list he admits that a couple are more things that he’d like to see happen then real predictions but in each case Ted offers an opinion that is backed by some interesting insight or view point.

Teds take on scripting languges and Ruby in particular (is Ruby simply a scripting language?) is that they will hit peak interest in 2006. He is also predicting that Ruby project will fail (and that failure will most likely come from a very large Ruby project that is currently being under-taken by a fairly significant consulting firm) and in doing so release an anti-Ruby backlash.

same story, different technology, same result. By 2007 the Ruby backlash will have begun.

In the same list Ted predicts that Vista will slip and Mustang (JDK 6.0) will ship leaving the Microsofties looking at WinFX (which will ship) and the Java crowd complaining that "it sucks".

In his "long-shot dream", JBoss becomes insolvent leaving the code base to developers with more altruistic motivations. Have you made any tech predictions for 2006?

I do not expect things to be moving so fast, so we won't see a revolution in 2006 or 2007, more something like an evolution.
- Operating systems: Linux will gain both on the server side and on the desktop, but will not become predominant on the desktop in these two years.
- Databases: Oracle, DB2 etc. will remain the products to use for most enterprise systems. But we might see if mysql or postgresql will gain more support.
- Ruby will become widely known and visible in usage. It will not become more popular then java until 2007. But it will become a reasonable competitor for Python, Perl, PHP and Java.
- C# will become more frequently used at the expense of VC++ and VB.

"Java developers will start gaining interest in building rich Java apps again. (Freely admit, this is a long shot, but the work being done by the Swing researchers at Sun, not least of which is Romain Guy, will by the middle of 2006 probably be ready for prime-time consumption, and there's some seriously interesting sh*t in there.) "


Totally agree.


I sometimes look at departmental or organisation-wide applications and wonder how we got to using web browsers for these types of applications. These days, deployment and manageability is as easy for Java client applications, and you get the benefit of quicker development and richer applications that are more responsive and make the end user more productive.

13)My long-shot hope, rather than prediction, for 2006: Sun comes to realize that the Java platform isn't about the language, but the platform, and begin to give serious credence and hope behind a multi-linguistic JVM ecosystem.

I think this is likely, given that the community is pushing it (Jython) and Sun is coming at it from a different angle (Javascript aka RhinoScript bundled with Mustang)

Paul , FirstPartners.net

What about Perl 6 ? Perl 6 will come with a virtual machine (Parrot). And dont forget that CGIs are still widly spread on small/medium web sites.

Parrot and Perl 6 are very interesting projects, but I do not see them as the hot spots of 2006. Maybe Perl6 will become usable by the end of 2006, but to become popular still needs some more time. It might happen 2007 or 2008 or so. I am not sure about it.

CGI is a really useful technique for small web applications, but it faces some competition from PHP and Ruby-on-Rails. I still like CGI with Perl very much for areas where it is strong.

But I do not see Java as a direct competitor of CGI, because CGI in its pure form does not scale up too well. For big applications Perl is ok, but with FastCGI or mod_perl, not so much with pure CGI. On the other hand using Java for such small applications is usually an expensive overkill. So they (Java/Servlet and Perl/CGI) do overlap, no doubt, but not to a great extent justifying to call them competitors of each other.