Of things to come

I came across a neat article on the Ruby Programming language from "beyond Java" on OnJava.com. Check it out at

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/11/16/ruby-the-rival.html
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/10/19/challenging-java-dominance.html

I think too many frameworks and complexity are playing against Java web development.
Java has been around for so many years, developers are still trying to simplify some of the things. New initiatives like Hibernate are providing some relief.

Its a miracle, that even after so many years of webism we don't have rapid application development for web applications considering at the least 55% of the tasks involved in all the projects are almost the same. Input , Data Validation , Persistence, workflow and Presentation.

There has not been one web development technology (in open source) that can be used to will let the developer query , store and display data to and from a database.RubyOnRails may be the answer to prayers of many in the open source world.

If you get a chance check out the video demo on their site. Its an excellent start if not anything else.