General Technology Predictions:

• This will not be the year of the podcast, nor the year of the corporate blog - though both will expand rapidly. They will have to wait until 2006. Instead, 2005 will be the year of customisation. Google or microsoft will provide something like a “My News” portal, based on a mix of RSS and their own monitoring. Yahoo has been doing this for years with My Yahoo, and now uses RSS, but it doesn’t have the traction of Google or MS.

• More attention will be paid to asteroid monitoring. Most reports indicate that detection and communication technology could have minimised the tragic losses caused by the earthquake, and events like this are reminders that we need to seriously plan for seemingly impossible events. In an economy that’s doing quite well, funding can be directed to such efforts.

• The BBC will continue to lead the way with podcasting, and will be the Adam Curry of the mainstream media podcasters, with more listeners than any other program on global current affairs.

Java Predictions:

• Spring for new development projects, refactoring to Spring, Spring integration with open-source frameworks, Spring textbooks, Spring would be a nice-to-have for prospective employees. Spring. Spring. Spring.

• Meanwhile, many Spring adopters will ignore one of the best things about Dependency Injection: testing with mock objects.

• Twenty new aspect-oriented frameworks, a dozen new ORM tools, and a whole bunch of web UI package.