Johnson: That's an interesting question. I'm not sure that I have enough really recent practical experience to answer that. I do think that certainly a number of the things that are getting attention with AJAX are not new. I think that the branding, having an acronym around AJAX, suddenly [brought] back to the mainstream some things that had been discussed a number of years ago. There has been significant progress in browsers that are implementing the HTML constructs now, which makes AJAX more feasible. But certainly, I do not think it's a radical new concept.

InfoWorld: What technologies might arrive to replace Java or supercede it?

Johnson: That's a very interesting question, because if you look at the lifecycle of languages, clearly Java is a fairly mature language. Certainly, there seems to be a surge in interest in dynamic languages, languages such as Ruby, Python. I think that it's very important that the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) is distinguished from Java. So Java is probably always going to be the primary language that runs on the JVM, but I think we should realize that the Java platform could potentially encompass the choice of programming languages. There was a number of interesting developments such as Groovy, which came out of the Java community, which is a very concise and powerful language in many respects. There are also Java versions [or ports] of popular languages such as Ruby. There's JRuby. This is one of the things that we're trying to achieve in Spring 2.0. We've actually enabled now the Spring component model to span any language that runs on the JVM, so I actually gave an example yesterday using JRuby.There are a lot of interesting developments in bringing dynamic languages to the Java platform. I would also like to say in order for Java to remain strong, I think it's vital that innovation continues in the Java language. Although Java 5 was a significant step forward, it's very important that Java continues to evolve as a language. I think once it stops evolving, it will start to die.

InfoWorld: To where would you see it evolving?

Johnson: I think that will partly come out of experience of how people end up using dynamic languages, and also I think there has to be a period of consolidation after Java 5, because it is a major new release. I think thereafter we need to look very carefully at why people like dynamic languages and which of those capabilities we can bring that may be relevant to Java as a language itself.