It seems that everything is topsy turvy:
Everything that is bad for you is good for you and everything that is old is new again.
Irony aside, this is something of a web 2.0 reboot, with some lessons learned by coming full circle with technologies that are right for the web.
SOAP vs CORBA, RSS vs ICE, PHP vs Some weirdo proprietary stuff.
The changes:
RSS hits the mainstream and is built into consumer portals – 10 years after it was a by-product of, er, a consumer portal, MyNetscape.
Scripting interfaces to enterprise aps – the first web enabled version of enterprise aps were scripting language based e.g. Sybase was Perl based.
Ajax, or DHTML as Flickr mercifully put it. In 94 you could navigate a 3d world on the web, in realtime with talking Avatars that made absolutely no money (The is nothing comparable to Onlive Traveller even today). Then everything went all Craigslist and Google, now Google did maps with javascript and minimalism is out again. (although this time perhaps some lessons will have been learned).
“The upped commitment to PHP from Oracle is the latest of several moves by large software vendors, including IBM, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, to capitalize on the growing popularity of scripting, or “dynamic” languages.”