Technologies To Watch, Beyond Java

This year has been full of change and new technologies in the Java universe. Here's a good article by Bruce Tate, "Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java’s Development Dominance", that mentions Ruby quite a bit. I've expressed my interest in Ruby in this weblog and it appears that many others within the Java community have similar viewpoints. Within the last few years I thought .NET would be taking off however, with the advent of Ruby on Rails and how 'clean and intuitive' it is as an object-oriented programming language, it looks like the currents may be changing in the next few years. I plan to get into Ruby this winter and most definitely in 2006.