In his blog, Charles Ditzel recounts his top 10 Java stories that have been popular and under-hyped.

• Java being open sourced
• The arrival of the Java SE 6.0
• AJAX
• Java EE 5.0 arrives with GlassFish
• NetBeans 5.5 arrives
• Multi-core chips architectures are here
• Free databases are here
• Java on the desktop
• Scripting arrives for the JVM
• Plugins

The justification for the #1 story;

Yes, it finally happened. My biggest concern was maintaining Java compatibility and things look very good in that respect. Despite the awkward and surreal protestations by IBM - the overwhelming support of the open source community for this announcement speaks for itself and easily makes this the top story of the year

Charles provides justifications for his other choices. For example, AJAX may not be all that new but what makes it a top story is the appearance of toolkit support. What do you believe were the biggest Java stories of the year.

For its impact on my day-to-day programming, AJAX, by far, ranks number one for me in 2006.