Eric v/d Laan, responsible for the JCC, has asked to come up with some topics for the upcoming NLJUD. Why not post a blog with some ideas? So here are my five cents:

• AJAX, not the football club from Amsterdam, but the technology to create rich internet applications using javascript, XML and DHTML, seems to have a lot of momentum these days. Frameworks around this technology are popping up all over the blog-o-sphere.
• OpenLaszlo seems to be a very nice alternative for creating rich internet applications. This technolgy combines regular java development with a flash front-end. In other words, a lot of Bling we regularly do not see in the world of Java.
• JBoss, known for its opensource application server, has been transferred from a small scale project to a full enterprise stack that is capable of beating the *#%$ out of the well known vendors who ask to much money for value. It’s more than just a Tomcat or Jetty bundled EJB container. It has BPM, it has Portal and even, just like its commercial counterparts, a world conference.
• Java is, besides a language, also a platform. And the java platform does not restrict you to its original language. As long as you talk the same bytecode, you can enjoy the fruits of the java virtual machine. There are a lot of languages, some very popular (groovy) and some very obscure (aardappel) that can be compiled into java bytecode. As a java developer/technical designer/architect you always ask questions about patterns, mechanisms and frameworks. But why not add the java language itself to list of questions to answer? I can probably come up with a couple of more topics, but I’ll leave that for a next blog.