I received an email stating that AOL finally abandoned the ugly Java applet that was used in the ICQ2Go, the Web version of the hugely popular (about 30M users) instant messaging system. The person who sent me this email also wrote, 'IMO this was the last popular Java applet. Now the king is dead.'

What drives a technology CEO or CTO to success in today's constantly changing technology ecosystem? We look at the question through the lens of the many interviews and articles we have published at SYS-CON.com which deal, sometimes only in passing, with exactly this issue. Executives quoted include Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie, Nexaweb Co-Founder & CTO Coach Wei, the founder of Internet.com Alan Meckler, and the Chairman & CEO of Parasoft Dr Adam Kolawa.

Many young programmers don't read books anymore. They google. They argue, 'When I need to find a solution it's just a click away. Why bother purchasing books that are outdated by the time of printing? Real programmers learn by doing - trial and errors'. I do not agree with this.

Ten years ago this month, Java was 1000 days old. Here we bring an article by the then Vice President of Marketing for Sun's Software Products and Platforms, George Paolini. Ten years on, we thought it might make interesting reading, since even back then Sun's community-focused position was clear: 'The Java platform was grown and evolved by a global community of developers on the World Wide Web,' wrote Paolini.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

JavaOne starts next week, and most of the Java developers will be watching closely what's new and exciting will be announced in the tried, true and aging Java. But my today's column is about books that will be sold at JavaOne. Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java. We spent a year writing this advanced book, and I'm pretty pleased with the result this is not one of these shallow books that repeat API descriptions of vendors manuals. In this book we are sharing how to design and build rich Internet enterprise applications in an object-oriented way with such great and complimentary technologies as Flex and J2EE. You can get this book at the booth of SYS-CON Media.

Gartner says that the total number of bloggers will peak during the first half of this year at around 100 million, causing John R. Patrick to ask rhetorically whether spring 2007 truly is The Peak of Blogging?

When building the right project team to complete a custom solution there are many forces at work. These include business drivers, technical drivers, and organizational and political motivations. Regardless of the business or organization there are three basic rules to follow in building a team to deliver a technical solution. The first is to involve the business before the team is even assembled. Each organization has certain technology standards that govern specific tools and products that can be used on a given project.

When I was learning how to work with AJAX, I went through a number of 101-type articles. The biggest problem with these tutorials is that the authors are trying to explain several things at once, which is confusing. I'll try to offer you a very simple example of an Ajax application.

For those who think that one weakness of the Newsweek piece is its title, MSNBC has come to the rescue by repurposing it under the - in my view, far sharper- title 'The New Wisdom of the Web.' This is a much more powerful rallying cry and I, for one, should have much preferred to see it used as Newsweek's front-cover headline, but such is the way of the world. Maybe the editors at MSNBC 'get it' better than those at Newsweek.

In one of my (several) former professional lives, I used to publish books about the future, including, for example, the world's first full-length book about groupware. Unless we can first capture and thereafter harvest - asynchronously, as and when it is most needed and most relevant - the collective wisdom of our time, how can it be deemed 'wisdom'? None of us has time any longer to attend all the conferences we'd like to, or to join all the societies or support all the causes that appeal to us for attention, time, and money. What we need above all is to be able to act co-intelligently. While co-intelligence is what we need, our actual opportunities for meaningfully interacting with our peers are in some respects growing in inverse proportion to the variety of ways in which we can execute the interaction.

I bet you thought agile development was supposed to be easier than a traditional, prescriptive process! That I would wax evangelical that agile development is the answer to everything, and it simplifies your life. Yeah, just like UML and model-driven architecture and XML and SOA and Web services are silver bullets. Uh-huh, r-i-g-h-t.

Ever since Google realized that 12% of the population would consult Google prior to seeing a doctor, which was followed by a British Medical Journal editorial suggesting that one of the natural next steps for Google would be some kind of medical database for personal use, rumors have been circulating that 'Google Health' would be the next addition to the Google stable. Last week the rumors were proven to be true.

When Nicholas Carr posed the question 'Does IT Matter?' in his now-famous Harvard Business Review essay, he clearly knew that it would provoke discussion. He probably didn't know, on the other hand, that it would eventually cause the world's richest man - whose wealth is derived 100% from IT - to call the essay, during a dinner party at his home, 'the dumbest thing I've ever read.'

Simplicity is the key driving force behind the success of Java. When Dr. Gosling invented the Java language in 1995, the goal was to make life easier for software developers. Java's elegant language design, simple API, and vendor-independence have made it the platform of choice for many developers. However, as Java evolves to address enterprise needs for scalability and flexibility, developer friendliness has taken a back seat. The complex programming model in EJB 2.1 and J2EE 1.4 has hindered Java's adoption, and it's the root cause for many slow-performing and error-prone Java applications.

Almost anyone who writes about Internet technologies, or i-Technology in shorthand, runs into a problem area from time to time concerning the issue of what in the i-Technology world was invented by whom?

Every year for the past 10 years, SYS-CON Media's 'Readers' Choice Awards' have given the multiple constituencies we serve - developers, architects, IT managers, vendors - a chance to exercise their democratic rights, not just through the ballot box but also through the nomination process. The products, tools, and services voted on in any particular set of awards are also nominated from within the community. If there are sins, either of omission or commission, then it is accordingly to the community itself that one needs to look, not to JDJ or SOA Web Services Journal or LinuxWorld Magazine or any of the other SYS-CON publications that hold RCAs each year.

This is traditionally the time of year for SYS-CON Media's roundup of i-Technology predictions from around the Web and the year's harvest of thoughts and viewpoints. According to our worldwide network of software development activists, evangelists, and executives, 2006 promises to be a vintage year for software development...

'Please don't read [anything] in to my not being at Sun's recent announcement with Oracle,' wrote Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz the weekend after Sun (represented not by Jonathan but by Scott McNealy) and Oracle (represented by Larry Ellison) announced a broad-based reinvigoration of their collaboration. Schwartz's intention? To quash idle press speculation that his absence from the Sun-Oracle 'Town Hall Meeting' somehow betokened something mysterious. It didn't, Schwartz insists.

Sometimes people ask me what it takes to run a successful business and I, who know only the media business, am always hesitant to reply. What could someone who has 'merely' spent the past 25 years exclusively in publishing and broadcasting via radio, TV, print and, most recently, online possibly tell anyone about the wider world of business - the hurly-burly of globalization, the brouhaha surrounding offshoring, the cut and thrust of M&As, hostile takeovers, poison pills, and platinum parachutes?

'Sun is making the Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 Management software and Sun developer tools available at no cost for both development and deployment,' said the company in an announcement yesterday. The announcement added that Sun is also 'reaffirming its commitment to open source this software.'

If successful trade expos are a good barometer of the market place (and they are), then things are going very well indeed with the homegrown category of apps named by Macromedia (soon to become Adobe), namely 'RIAs.' Which started me thinking: to what extent are the winners in the game of personal and enterprise software those who first and foremost win The Name Game?

Sun and Google are going to be teaming up to take on Microsoft in its holiest of holy markets, the desktop. Could such an alliance have been dreamed of just one year ago? The answer, of course, is 'Yes!' 'Game-changing' is what a disruptive company like Google does best, and Sun for its part isn't a slouch when it comes to innovation, especially not since the arrival of Jonathan Schwartz.

September is here and since the name comes from the Latin septem, for 'seven' - September having been until 153 BCE not the ninth but the seventh month of the Roman calendar - I have no hesitation in saying that it's an appropriate month to pluck just seven items from the wealth of information and insight in this issue and say just a little about each of them, to help you to decide what to read first in this issue of JDJ.

All the myriad commentators who monitor Internet technologies and the i-Technology companies on the NASDAQ doubtless have their own private cluster of indicators that they use to take a weather-check on the overall state of the industry. For some, it's as simple as looking at the NASDAQ index level. This (wholly understandable) approach is the one adopted by SYS-CON's own Roger Strukhoff, who wrote recently

Who do you suppose registered their corporate Internet domain name first: Microsoft, Oracle, or Sun? The answer is Sun; it did so in 1986. When in the early 1980s Dr. David Mills, John Postel, Zaw-Sing Su, and Dr. Paul Mockapetris were all involved in the development of the Domain Name System, known ever since by its initials DNS, their aim was to allow organizations to have meaningful names for paths to their systems, since by then computers had begun connecting to each other over wide area networks. However, it was unlikely that at the time any of those fine professionals ever had an inkling of what kind of unprecedented 'land-grab' the system was destined to spawn.

There comes a time, for many Web sites, when the transition from static HTML to dynamic HTML has to be made. Whether it's a static company Web site that needs to become a dynamic online store, or a simple collection of family pictures that's become too large to manage with HTML alone, a decision has to be made to move to an environment that makes it easier to build and maintain the site. Deciding to use server-side programming to create your site on-the-fly can become the only option, but what language you decide to use can be a difficult and important decision.

Technology birthdays come and go, but Internet technologies, by their very nature, aren't old enough to allow yet for centenaries, or even diamond anniversaries. So it is fascinating to see how people are reacting to the fact that popular technologies like Java, ColdFusion, and Flash have now finally reached - or are about to reach - the ripe old age of 10.

Do you feel that being a Java guru sets you apart and makes you indispensable in your company? Or are you an entry-level person scared of being laid off given all these outsourcing trends? What are your career choices in the corporate world? Put on your headphones, turn on Pink Floyd's album The Wall, and let's talk...

When we opened up the JDJ domain to bloggers everywhere, we knew the take-up would be good. But one thing we couldn't be certain about in advance was whether the blogs themselves would be any good. We needn't have worried. As many of you will already have found out, the editors of JDJ all blog regularly, and naturally RSS feeds are available too - so if in between issues of the magazine you want to read something by, say, Ajit Sagar, all you need to do now is scoot over.

When in October of last year I asked the rhetorical question 'Is Mergermania Back?' (JDJ, Vol. 9, issue 10), there wasn't much doubt that it already was, but it took until last month to truly demonstrate just to what extent. It's not just back; in March we saw it's back with a vengeance.

In a world bristling with TLAs (Three-Letter Acronyms), it's interesting that one acronym that has often caused an upset in the world of software development should be one containing just two letters: XP. (No, not *that* XP. What we're talking about here is XP as in eXtreme Programming.)

As Sun open-sources Solaris, and another software development 'community' is tugged into being around it, critics are saying - Red Hat's general counsel Mark Webbink in particular - that the strategy will fail.

No sooner had we begun our reader-driven quest for the top twenty software people in the world than - by popular acclaim, as they say - we're going to extend the field to choose from...from forty to over a hundred. Here we bring you a sneak peek at the sixty contenders that we'll be adding now to the poll, with thanks to everyone who has proferred suggestions. Even 100 won't do this subject justice, but it will be interesting to see how the i-Technology community decides to rank them, when voting on this new, expanded group begins in February.

Our search for the Twenty Top Software People in the World is nearing completion. In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final 'cut' to you, so here are the top 40 nominations in alphabetical order. Our aim this time round is to whittle this 40 down to twenty, not (yet) to put the twenty in any order of preference. All you need to do to vote is to go to the Further Details page of any nominee you'd like to see in the top half of the poll when we close voting on Christmas Eve, December 24, and cast your vote. Happy voting!

When I asked in a previous editorial who the Top Twenty Software People in the World were, I knew there would be a widely divergent response from readers. As promised, here's a preliminary update on the identity of some of your nominees.

Hurricanes Ivan, Charley, and Frances notwithstanding, sometimes being in the eye of the storm has its advantages. At SYS-CON Media, where we by definition dwell at the epicenter of what might be called the i-technology weather cycle, our central position allows us to ask industry influencers for quickfire responses to burning issues of the day.

For over a decade, Tim Bray, one of the prime movers of XML, managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo. That was from 1988 to 1999. During the end of his time there he launched one of the first public Web search engines (in 1995), coinvented XML 1.0, and coedited 'Namespaces in XML' (1996-1999).

Ever since Nicholas G. Carr's now historic Harvard Business Review article, 'IT Doesn't Matter,' published in the May 2003 edition of HBR, it was only a matter of time before the wider world caught up with Carr's thesis. The article formed only a small part of Carr's broader exploration of the influence of information technology on business strategy contained in his book Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, but it is the 'IT Doesn't Matter' chapter that sticks in everybody's mind.

The six blind men who attempted to describe the elephant eventually described it only from their perspectives - the parts and not the whole. The same malady can be found lurking in one of the problems that faces many organizations that have adopted J2EE as their platform of choice: the migration of these applications between J2EE application servers - be it vendors or versions.