While AJAX, as XML co-inventor Tim Bray puts it, "tries to do everything in the browser using just what the browser ships with," RIA frameworks like Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and JavaFX aim to take developers beyond the limitations of the browser. "I'm not brave enough to predict who wins," Bray noted in a SYS-CON.com feature earlier in the year, "but I do predict that 2008 will be a crucial year; either RIAs enter the mainstream, or they start to smell like a red herring left in the sun."

Bray's predictions came in the feature "Where's AJAX, SOA and Virtualization Headed in 2008?" - which also included predictions from: Joshua Allen, Microsoft; Dr Adam Kolawa, Parasoft; Eric Newcomer, IONA Technologies; Bill Roth, BEA Systems; Brad Abrams, Microsoft; Kevin Hoffman, iPhone Developer's Journal; Ian Thain, Sybase; Yakov Fain, Farata Systems.

Bray is Director of Web Technologies at Sun. He managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo in 1987-1989, co-founded Open Text Corporation (Nasdaq:OTEX) in 1989, launched one of the first public web search engines in 1995, co-invented XML 1.0 and co-edited "Namespaces in XML" between 1996 and 1999.

He also founded Antarctica Systems (antarctica.net) in 1999, and served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee on the W3C Technical Architecture Group in 2002-2004.

Read Bray's 2008 predictions in full here.