Web 2.0 tools are doing a wonderful job of providing consumers with cool and productive new ways of performing common, simple tasks over the Internet. These tools primarily perform a single task such as allowing consumers to manage their photos, read their favorite newsfeeds, express themselves online through blogs, and communicate with friends via social networks.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

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?

Within the past few years, Web 2.0 has become a major technology trend, dramatically impacting the way consumers interact with information and applications. This consumer trend is now extending into the enterprise; however, businesses have been more reluctant than consumers to adopt these new technologies.

As a web 2.0 guy who blogs on 'Direct from Web 2.0', I did not see this coming. In fact, my preferences were Mitt Romney from the republican side (maybe McCain too) and Hilary Clinton from the democrat side. I think the three of them (Mitt Romney, John McCain and Hilary Clinton) will do better in the oval office than other candidates. Just like how venture capitalists pick CEOs for their portfolio companies, I put 'experience' and -track record of execution' very high in my assessment. If you are conducting a CEO search for your company, would you pick someone who just graduated from Harvard executive MBA, or someone who has been there, done that and has been doing that for the entire life?

The evolution of Web sites to dynamic rich interactive applications is a true revolution for users. But for ASP.NET developers tasked with building high-performing scalable applications, it presents major challenges. The features that characterize blogs, wikis, personalized pages, and other data-driven Web 2.0 applications fundamentally change processing, transmission, and rendering workloads, and require new approaches and solutions. In Web 2.0 applications:

The Alliance's mission is to accelerate customer success with AJAX by promoting a customer¹s ability to mix and match solutions from AJAX technology providers and by helping to drive the future of the AJAX ecosystem.

'The Java backlash,' writes Bruce Eckel, 'has been building up steam, and we're starting to see some fundamental shifts because of it.' Java has been around for 10 years yet applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. Applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got excited about AJAX instead.

Nowhere in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence did Thomas Jefferson reference the Internet, eBay, Skype, or Flickr. But if he'd lived another 180 years, to 2006 instead of 1826, I feel certain he would at some point have said something like this...

The significance of blogging is not the word 'blog' whether used as a verb or a noun, but its role as a harbinger of the game-changing Web-as-platform revolution. In particular, the migration of blogging from the individual toward the enterprise...

The World Wide Web, as we know it, is exploding. From its fragments emerges a new 'container based' Web based on Widgets. For the lack of a better term, I shall call it a Widget Widget Web. I have long advocated the power of Widgets to transform the Web as we know it. Hence, I am starting a new set of blogs on the future potential and evolution of Widgets.

Adobe today announced that it intends to release the full Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Early in 2006 there was a strong sense among industry insiders that AJAX-like approaches were a shoo-in as the new paradigm for fulfilling the software development community's dream of freedom from OS or runtime environment dependent technologies. Was the early optimism borne out by subsequent events? I'll say!

2006 - the year in which YouTube became culturally ubiquitous, Flash video became the de facto video standard of the Web, Microsoft beta-launched Vista, and the Wii entered our lives - was also memorable for one or two other, real-world events such as the hanging of Saddam Hussein, prompting the obvious question: is the progress of i-Technology front-runners like Google and eBay more, or less, important than the trial and execution of Saddam?

On Monday it emerged that Microsoft had applied for two patents covering subscribing and discovering what it refers to as 'Web feeds' - sparking a furore in the blogosphere and elsewhere that Redmond had imperial designs on RSS users.

One of Gartner's top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide. Gartner estimates that there are more than 200M former bloggers who have ceased posting.

'Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago,' said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales today as OpenServing, in what he called 'the next phase of this experiment,' was made free. 'We don't have all the business model answers, but we are confident - as we always have been - that the wisdom of our community will prevail,' said Wales.

GWT in a nutshell: 'Write your AJAX code in Java, leveraging concepts and patterns that have become very familiar to UI developers; develop using proven development environments that include good code completion and refactoring tools like Eclipse; debug your apps by running them in a real browser, using a solid debugger; then use a compiler to translate all that Java code to tiny, high-performance JavaScript that automatically works around most browser quirks without so much as a nod from the developer.'

As I write this, the stock price of Google, Inc. just exceeded $500 for the first time in the company's still-brief (two-year) history as a public company. That gives Google a market cap of $150 billion, compared to $19.5 billion for Sun. What's the explanation?

Based on the fact that the first working draft of the design principles for XML were published on 14 November 1996, XML guru Uche Ogbuji declared this week XML's 10th Birthday. Although the actual W3C Recommendation Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 wasn't published till 10 February 1998, work on XML definitely started - Ogbuji recounts - around 1996, rooted in almost thirty years of SGML.

'People are simply amazed when they understand the full scope of this product, its more than 100 components and its suite of visual tooling,' said Kevin Hakman, director of product marketing, TIBCO, as his company yesterday announced the availability of version 3.2 of its acclaimed AJAX RIA toolkit.

Adobe Systems, owners of the Flash Player currently installed on over 700 million Internet connected desktops and mobile devices worldwide, will contribute the player's source code to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will in turn use the code to host a new open source project called Tamarin.

'It's not often that I wish I was in America,' writes one (UK-based) developer, 'but this week sees the MAX 2006 show in Las Vegas.' He is not alone: around the Web world, bloggers both outside the US and inside have been discussing the many announcements made at this year's MAX and their implications for working developers and designers everywhere. WebDDJ brings you a representative round-up.

Emergence is a strong, albeit sometimes unpredictable force. The past two weeks have been full of some interesting conversations/observation s. Google bought JotSpot. I was reminded yet again that Google Calendar is a great product, Gmail is a strange one and Docs and Spreadsheet are neither here nor there.

If the idea of a crafting or collectors club makes you think of dusty community centers and corny newsletters, you're stuck in the wrong century. Today, even small clubs can look professional, run smoothly, and grow membership at the click of a mouse.

From the beginning, the World Wide Web that Tim Berners-Lee imagined was a place where the architecture of participation ruled. Berners-Lee's first application for accessing the information Web was both a browser and an editor, and throughout the early 1990s he worked diligently to encourage Web browser development groups to develop editors and servers as well as browsers. As early as the spring of 1992, the challenge was clear: 'Although browsers were starting to spread, no one working on them tried to include writing and editing functions?.As soon as developers got their client working as a browser and released it to the world, very few bothered to continue to develop it as an editor' (Weaving the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee).

Boeing has announced the shutdown of their airborne Wi-fi service, Connexion. It represents a subtle blow to Web 2.0 and gives us all pause for thought.

As you would know from my previous posts, I am a fan of Widgets and I believe in the potential of Widgets (both web and mobile) to transform the web experience as we know it. When I spoke at AJAXWorld, Adam Sah of Google gave a fascinating presentation about Widgets (which Google calls gadgets).

Might a phenomenon as young as the Internet have already moved into its second era? Is Web 2.0 more of a rebellion, a corrective to Web 1.0 - or is it a genuine revolution?

I recently read an article in the 'mainstream' media that gave me pause. The author made an assertion that the current trend towards Open Source might just be a passing fad. I thought about this and looked critically at the software industry, thinking about whether there was merit in that statement. After all, we have seen plenty of high flyers peter out in a software industry riddled with buzzwords and acronyms-of-the-day. I just don't believe that open source is one of them.

'With the acquisition of Actimagine's vector graphics technology, we will be able to further enhance the most popular, high-volume mobile and consumer devices as well as broaden our reach into emerging markets,' said Al Ramadan, SVP of Adobe's Mobile and Device Solutions Business Unit, as Adobe today announced the acquisition of vector graphics technology developed by Actimagine.

'There is a misconception that social networking is the exclusive domain of teenagers, but this analysis confirms that the appeal of social networking sites is far broader,' says a report this week by the Internet research firm comScore Media Metrix. For example, 40% of MySpace visitors are 35 years old or older, the analysis claims.

At the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo and OpenAjax Alliance back to back meetings in Santa Clara, CA this week, it has been hard not to think about the developer community and how Web 2.0 is impacting it today.

Some commentators have taken Microsoft's entry in to the Web 2.0 world as a reason for spreading doom and gloom and predicting the annihilation of small, innovative developers. I disputed this prediction and agreed with entrepreneurs Jason Fried of 37 Signals and Sridhar Vembu of Zoho. The whole hype around Windows Live got me thinking whether there is some level of reality distortion going on.

How about if we spelt AJAX differently, asked Håkon Wium Lie, at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, so that the fundamental role played by CSS was incorporated and immortalized?

'Our new platform goes beyond current enterprise Web 2.0 technologies to help optimize and streamline the actual business activities, increasing the speed and accuracy of decision-making by business professionals,' said JackBe CEO and co-founder Luis Derechin, as JackBe used the occasion of AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2006 to announce what it is positioning as 'the industry's most comprehensive solution for delivering enterprise AJAX applications based on SOA and Web services': its Presto REA platform.

The first 'Power Panel' of AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2006 just kicked off, with 4 industry experts led by AJAXWorld Magazine Editor-in-Chief Dion Hinchcliffe, discussing 'Web-Oriented Architecture: SOA + The Web + REST.'

The thing that delivers that rich AJAX experience is the decoupling of the technical back end from the user experience. As Bruce Sterling expressed it, AJAX is the equaivalent of 'Roller skates for the Web.' But when are roller skates dangerous? When people are still learning how to move on those skates.