During my rather long software development career I made several switches from one programming language to another. The last one was back in 1998 when I switched from PowerBuilder to Java. Since Java is much more than just a language, it kept me busy all these years. I was learning newly born technologies like Servlets, JSP, EJB, JMS…I’m always closely watching what’s happening in the Java community, buying (and reading!) books on new frameworks (Spring, Hibernate…), programming and design principles (OOD, AOP, SOA, ESB…), buzzword techniques (AJAX), open source tools, etc.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that I do not see any new “revolutionary thingy” that would get me really exited. I’m not leaving Java because there is nowhere to go. All these threats that some particular language will kill Java can not be taken seriously. It’s like saying that Italian language will kill English. Italian songs sound great, and let them be heard forever, but the role of the English is much bigger than just singing.

At first, AJAX sounded like an interesting technology. But after giving it a closer look, I put it aside. People are filled with joy seeing how the content of a web page changes after each key stroke. But the price is way too high for achieving this functionality (at least today). First, I do not want to become a JavaScript expert, second, if you’ll show your users one Web page with this new functionality, they’ll force you to change all of them (try to explain them that this is not as easy as they think!) and this will become you primary job, your server performance will suffer (the number of the server request will grow tremendously), and on, and on, and on. What’s good for Google is not always good for business-oriented software.

IMHO, Java need a major breakthrough in the front end (GUI) area, NetBeans (Matisse) is a step in the right direction, but they still have a long way to go. Adobe has some good front end tools (Flash and Flex from Macromedia), and using them with Java in the back might be a good idea.

AOP should have a good future.

Anything else? What’s your take on this? Do you see the next big thing in Java?