In our annual round-up of technology predictions, Yakov Fain - editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's Flex Developer's Journal - says "Flash Player will remain the best deployment platform for rich Internet applications. While Microsoft is trying to come up with a competitive delivering platform for RIA, it’s not going to happen in 2008. Silverlight 1.0 is a good start, the next version (1.1) will be even better, but it’ll take time to release a product that can do more than streaming multimedia."

Yakov Fain is a managing principal of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest book, "Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters" in Spring 2007.  Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group and teaches Java and Flex 2 part time at New York University. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor.

Fain's predictions come in the end-of-year SYS-CON.com feature "Where's AJAX, SOA and Virtualization Headed in 2008?" - which also includes predictions from: Tim Bray, Sun; Joshua Allen, Microsoft; Dr Adam Kolawa, Parasoft; Eric Newcomer, IONA Technologies; Bill Roth, BEA Systems;  Kevin Hoffman, iPhone Developer's Journal; Ian Thain, Sybase; and Brad Abrams, Microsoft..

Read Yakov Fain's 2008 predictions in full here.

AJAXWorld - March 18-20, 2008, New York City
The first one of the upcoming SYS-CON conferences is AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, which will take place March 18-20, in New York City. Last year more than 70 companies sponsored it, including 3Tera, Addison-Wesley, Adobe, Apress, Backbase, Bindows, Conference Guru, Cynergy Systems, Dynamic Toolbar, Extension Media, Farata Systems, Flash Goddess, FrogLogic, GoingToMeet.com, Google, Helmi Technologies, IBM, ICEsoft, ILOG, IT Mill, Ittoolbox, JackBe, JetBrains, Kaazing, Krugle, Laszlo Systems, Lightstreamer, Manning Publications, Methods & Tools, Microsoft, Nexaweb, OpenSpot, OpSource, Oracle, Parasoft, Passport Corporation, PushToTest, Quasar Technologies, Rearden Commerce, Servoy, SmartClient / Isomorphic Software, SnapLogic, Sun Microsystems, TechTracker Media, Tele Atlas, The Thomson Corporation, ThinWire, TIBCO Software, TileStack, Universal Mind, Vertex Logic, Web Spiders, and Webtide.