Quick reference of things I can remember from this year, categorised as Stuff (good), Fluff (hype), and Duff (just plain bad).

Stuff:

Ruby – Make programming fun again
AOP – Big, and getting bigger
SEDA – A sensible architecture for scalable systems

Fluff:

Groovy – Does the world need another scripting language for the Java platform?
Geronimo.

Duff:

Maven. The java virus.
The reflection-based visitor pattern. Are you joking?
Testing multithreaded code. Since when does ‘deterministic’ mean ‘runs fast’?