You are right Alex. In the twenty years of software development I went through, programming languages and techniques changed many times. What remain are software engineering basics. Even though, engineering styles were changing from procedural to object orientation. Basic patterns decide whether software will be good or not. One of these is simplicity. Systems I met over time that were based on simple structures were fast, reliable and maintainable. Another basic pattern what I call is 1-click-targeting for user interfaces. User interfaces that provide short ways to functions keep users happy and help tremendously in the acceptance of a system.

For me, the move to what's called web 2.0 comes surprisingly late. The first purely Javascript based application I have written for a client in 1999. A financial calculator, once loaded, even over small bandwidth, it never had to call back the server again. It worked on Netscape 3 and still does. From my consulting work a webbased Desktop arose by the project Cross-Desktop ([visit link]). I am always surprised about the strongness of Javascript.

"No IntelliJavaScript yet..." ?!?!
I can't beleive I'm reading it! One of the widely announced features of IntelliJ IDEA 5.0 was JavaScript support - it provided code completion, formatting, "find usages", structure view, etc. And it was released almost a year ago!
In 5.1 release, the JavaScript editor was improved (and again, release was in Febraury, 2006 - almost half a year ago). Now IntelliJ JavaScript editor has refactoring, navigation, on-the-fly error highligting, and other productivity features. They are described here: [visit link]
As for AJAX, there is a demo where Ajax page counter is created in 5 minutes with the help of InteliJ IDEA ([visit link])
Even GWT is going to be supported in the nearest future, in the forthcoming 6.0 release ([visit link])

Nice article. I can appreciate your frustrations and realizations as you made your transition. My company has been migrating all our development efforts to rich web applications, but we took a slightly different approach. We created a Java framework that handles all the browser HTML and JavaScript as well as the client-server communication layer. This allows up to develop rich web applications as if they were desktop Java GUI applications. We recently decided to release it open source under the GPL. You can check it out at [visit link]