End of the year and the hyperbole winner is....

Web Services according to Jon Oltsik. And this time, Smalltalk is prepared - VW 7 shipped with full Web Services support. From the article:

This was a tough call for me. I truly believe Web services will improve application development and integration and has the potential to change the way companies use software. Even so, the technology still remains very immature. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a good foundation for standards, but data definitions and business semantics remain a battleground. Web services also suffer from a lack of application-level security