If you don't like change, stay away from the software development world. But if you embrace change, then these are among the most exciting, if volatile, times in years.

As early as the very first days of the World Wide Web, it was clear that tremendous change was coming. Almost overnight, it seems now, the world of enterprise software needed to become more Web-centric.

After the industry's initial and often feeble efforts to grasp how to fully integrate the Web into the development process, the emergence of the J2EE stack, countered and complemented by the C#/.NET development environment, began what should be a long history of developing Web-savvy, service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

The SOA Web services approach represented the leading edge just a few short years ago, and is still a relatively new term among a large part of the enterprise IT world today. Organizations of all sizes are pledging to be more SOA-centric.

Meanwhile, a different drumbeat created by the Linux operating system caused large numbers of developers worldwide to march to it. An OS rather than a dev environment, Linux nevertheless has had an enormous influence on software development and hardware sales over the past few years.

Linux has no particular effect on the contemporaneous movement toward SOA, but its spirit has been carried on in the form of AJAX, another new way to think about software development. Announcements about AJAX strategies and "enhancements" are now coming in a steady drumbeat from IT companies of all sizes and points of view.

The AJAX phenomenon is being touted by many of the same people who first embraced Linux and the open source software philosophy it represents. AJAX has burgeoned, almost overnight it seems now, requiring that the world of enterprise software become more AJAX-centric.

.NET developers are, of course, caught up in all of these trends. As there are not many clean lines of demarcation between the various centricities, Microsoft has taken the expected approach of responding with strategies and products that try to throw a blanket over the whole magilla. Just as .NET was developed in competition with the J2EE stacks, for example, and ASP.NET within it to tackle many of the SOA issues developers face, Microsoft has also developed its "Atlas" approach to handle the new demand for AJAX-type thinking.

Although a previous commentator in this publication has bemoaned the lack of a company-wide strategy for managed code interfaces for all of the company's products, something he believes is necessary for the longevity of .NET, Microsoft continues to work on maintaining a very strong presence in the dynamic world of software development.

By using JSON in AJAX.NET, for example, to dynamically define objects, rather than take the traditional JavaScript-to-XML approach that defines AJAX, Microsoft continues to define what it can on its own terms. Taking a slightly higher-level view, the company continues to respond to the different drumbeats in the software development world, and the next several months will be crucial in determining how much momentum AJAX truly has, how much of this momentum will swing toward Microsoft - and to what extent the highly complex demands of successful SOA implementations can be reconciled (or perhaps embraced) by the proponents of AJAX.

But wait, there's more. The software world has hardly forgotten the original notion of the centricity of the World Wide Web. After all, the really big story this year may have less to do with SOA and AJAX, and more to do with Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!