Often in software I find myself preaching restraint to those who wish to move platforms for no apparent reason than to keep up with the IT fashion industry; however, even harder than the silver-bullet chasers is dealing with organizations where change is required, not only in a company's software stack, but throughout their entire IT department.

In a recent presentation I attended, the speaker warmed up with a couple of bulleted lists that outlined the agenda of the session before moving onto his third slide that was clearly many days, work of stitching together powerpoint glyphs and figures in a sort of three dimensional loop that attempted to show the progression of software APIs around the evolution of networked computing.

A number of very significant development efforts are underway that bode well for Desktop Java's future. On the language side is the Java FX script project http:// www.sun.com/software/java fx/index.jsp. Java FX is neat because it provides a high-level scripting interface that runs on top of the Java 2D API. From the users' viewpoint it means they don't have to write Java code and, for better or worse, understand the intricacies of threads, Java 2D or Swing class hierarchies, timing frameworks, and so forth.

This is a short story about my friend (let's call him Joe). The last 15 years prior to his retirement Joe spent working as a mainframe programmer for a large financial firm in New York City. He stopped working at 67, collected well deserved retirement package and was looking forward to a new life going places around the world and meeting new people. His lovely wife Mary is a food critic and is also into travel. We often travel with Joe and Mary, and like these trips a lot. We never feel any age difference because Joe and Mary are a lot more energetic and interesting people than many 40 years old that I know.

Having attended two conferences in the past three weeks and seen untold presentations, I've come to the conclusion that irrespective of the subject matter, each presenter invariably falls back on the same technique to impress the audience: to rely on the skills of a conjurer or circus ringmaster as they try to captivate, amaze, and hoodwink their audience.

The phrase 'not invented here,' or NIH, when applied to technology, describes a resistance by a group to use a perfectly valid solution to a problem they're encountering because they'd rather build the answer from scratch than adopt something existing that already does the job. Assuming that there are no legal or licensing issues to stop the already-built technology from being included, the reasons behind the recalcitrance to its usage usually boil down to human nature.

When the fast-paced, three-day program of AJAXWorld Conference & Expo in the Santa Clara Convention Center finally ended earlier this month, with over 90 technical sessions and presentations from leading AJAX vendors like Laszlo Systems, JackBe, and Backbase as well as from established software giants like IBM, TIBCO, and Adobe, the overwhelming impression delegates, speakers, and sponsors alike were left with was of having been in attendance at something special, something unusual, something potent.

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 the search colossus a market cap of $150 billion, many times in excess of its physical assets - currently valued at $10.2 billion.

The question that forms the title of this editorial was recently asked by a young observer of the Web 2.0 scene, Skinner Layne, who contends that the key thing to determine about Web 2.0 is whether it is best characterized as a revolution in Web development or as a rebellion against Web 1.0 - two quite different things.

Since most any two words can and will be put together in this world, what with us being Homo Loquens and all, it's easy just to shrug when you hear new colloquies like 'social software,' 'social networking,' or 'social computing' and dismiss them as just three more inevitable permutations in a world of whirling words and phrases.

I want back in the '90th...seriously. Ten years ago I didn't know Java: I'd been using PowerBuilder and was able to program pretty much everything in this RAD object-oriented tool. To find a job back then, all I needed to have on my résumé was PB, a single framework (PFC), and SQL. With these skills I could have created a prototype of a rich CRUD client/server application in a couple of days. However, that was the sunset of the client/server era.