We are approaching 2007, I ‘ll try to take my guess about what ‘s going to happen in the IT world.

1. Open sourcing Java won ‘t matter – it ‘s a non-event.

2. Ruby and Ruby on Rails won ‘t make it in 2007 either. I still do not see a compelling reason to switch.

3. Ajax hype is stronger than I thought mainly because of the life support offered by frameworks like GWT. But still, I ‘m not going to recommend enterprise IT shops make any serious investments in AJAX.

4. We are going to watch some interesting competition in the RIA arena between Adobe ‘s Flex and Microsoft ‘s WPF/E. Adobe has more mature technology, while Microsoft is an established player among enterprise developers. I won ‘t be surprised if Adobe will dramatically drop the licensing fees for their Flex Data Services.

5. Java remains the best choice for the server side enterprise development, but it won ‘t be able to compete on the desktop.

6. IT outsourcing remains a part of our lives despite (or because of) the poor management by American corporate IT staff, and the reason is not the lower labor cost of overseas programmers, but the abcence of programmers in the USA.

7. Switch from plain stateless text-based to rich internet applications will slowly continue. But this won ‘t be an easy process – it ‘s not that easy to get rid of these annoying but familiar habits of dealing with one-page-at-a-time applications. The fight for the Back button on the Web browser will continue.

8. I ‘m not going to afford an early retirement. Let me go and buy this lottery ticket for tonight ‘s mega millions…