Amen.

What does Mark Logic consider to be its competitors in the XRX space?

i guess the really big thing you're missing here is JavaME or its younger little brother JavaFX. this is the kind of thing oracle now wants to push for RIAs, in the same way as MS pushes Silverlight and Adobe pushes Flash. i think this is mostly the reason for the assault at Ajax, not so much the J2EE part of the Java world.

In short, "middleware" is getting *much* thinner. As javascript evolves--I suppose we're already there, actually(HTML5 ftw? ;)--there will be a greater need for app programmers to use JS instead of java. I guess google has been trying to take the sharp edges off of that corner with GWT, but I think there's too much distance between the application's implementation and the platform for app programmers to be able to use the browser platform effectively via GWT. Things like objective-j/cappucino can give most of the desired application structure while not distancing itself from the actual platform(JS)). Hard times ahead for any heavy web framework, IMO.

Well, I suppose we could still use java for authorization. ;)

cheers from phx.

Something which frustrates me about JavaFX and GWT is the notion that programming in Java is somehow much easier than native JavaScript. This is so untrue, JavaScript is a great language and the cross-browser story is getting stronger with old browsers falling away, Webkit and Gecko in the ascendency and rock-solid libraries such as jQuery. HTML, CSS and JavaScript offers view-source, progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, something way beyond blobs of binary single-supplier lockin such as Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX.

Meanwhile, yes, Marklogic sounds great, as are Open Source keystores such as CouchDB, Tokyo Cabinet, Memcached, etc where the only bit of RDBMS they use is the index.

Interesting times ahead for Java/Oracle, hence the "Ajax is hard" FUD, I guess.

As Google Engine emerges some other 'Platform as a Service' such as Ndjin handle server side bizlogic with JSON/XML webservice stack and leave the UI to Ajax (GWT, JQuery,...) or other rich application language (AS3/Flex/Air,...). This sound as good-old traditional client/server approach revisited with 'internet' technologies thanks to the recent evolutions with web frameworks.

Honestly, I've never understood why so much has been invest in server side tech in charge of producing the view just because of poor browser implementation. Just as if everybody was looking at the wrong side or misuse of tech (php/mysql or JSP/JDBC mixing mvc in same files for example).

Ajax is the low-level protocol that a Java programmer shall not even notice it. Programming Ajax shall be the same as programming Swing. ZK is one of the best implementations that really make Ajax transparent to Java programmers.