The 2008 Virtualization Journal Readers' Choice Awards will be given in 17 categories and award-winning products and services will be selected by Virtualization Journal readers. Virtualization is fast becoming a key requirement for every server in the data center, enabling increased workloads in server consolidation projects, efficient software development and testing, resource management for dynamic data centers, application re-hosting and compatibility, and high-availability partitions.

Is it easy yet to make AJAX applications that easily go offline? Are developers better off using an AJAX framework, a toolkit or just coding their own AJAX/JavaScript? Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud? Sessions on these and dozens of other topics have already begun streaming in to AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City on March 18-20, 2008.

In his keynote in March at AJAXWorld 2008 East in New York City, Doug Crockford intends to argue that, since the Web has now grown from a document retrieval system into an application delivery system, the cleverness of the Web development community and the surprising expressive power of JavaScript have brought us to its very limits.

SOA World Magazine announced that nominations are now open for the SOA World Magazine Readers' Choice Awards, which recognize excellence in the software, solutions, or services provided by the industry's top vendors. SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards, also known as the 'Oscars of the Software Industry,' has been one of the most prestigious industry award programs for more than a decade.

Sun Microsystems is involved in a variety of open source projects related to AJAX technologies. This presentation recaps some of the most important projects that Sun is driving or actively participating in including jMaki: an AJAX framework that provides a lightweight model for creating JavaScript-centric AJAX-enabled Web applications using Java, Ruby, PHP, and Phobos.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, Server Virtualization, and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

Every major enterprise technology vendor has developed its own SOA strategy, supported by innumerable mid-size companies and start-ups offering specific SOA aspects or entire solutions. Submit your speaking proposal today to discuss your SOA strategy at SOA World Conference & Expo on June 23-24, 2008, in New York City. Tracks will include Web 2.0/AJAX and SOA, Interop Standards and Services, Real-World SOA, SOA Technology, Virtualization, and Specially Selected Hot Topics.

AJAX is about a rich user interface that is not just reactive but also pro-active. It's about content, perhaps socialized (user-generated) content; and it's about pain-free deployment, with loosely coupled services. It's not about 'eye candy.' In this keynote Joe Stagner uses PageFlakes and the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK as examples of best-of-breed rich user interfaces to show the balance in the context of AJAX.

This session will address issues to consider when selecting an AJAX toolkit and the most effective IDE for the implementation. It will identify the 30-40 UI components most commonly used in business and mission critical software applications that can be used as a benchmark for evaluating various toolkits, then explore the top evaluation criteria including component behaviors, customization, flexibility, frameworks, licensing and documentation. Attendess will be provided with a comparison survey for the 6-8 most widely used AJAX UI component libraries. Further discussion will address how to select the appropriate IDE once a commitment has been made to a AJAX UI toolkit.

Today's Rich Internet Application (RIA) architectures now allow us to distribute the right user experience, to the right form factors and delivery model, from the Web to the desktop.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote entitled "The Future of the Virtual Enterprise" at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. "Virtualization is the hottest subject today," said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

SYS-CON Events announced today that the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.'

Kyle Gabhart gave a highly entertaining and informative session this morning at SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco.

Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that readers can themselves infer where AJAX is headed.