Developer.com announced winners of their Product of the Year 2007 contest, and it's interesting to see AJAX the winner for the second year in a row. Bradley L. Jones pointed on developer.com's :

AJAX is the technology that nearly everyone is talking about and the technology that has sprouted hundreds of products over the past year or two. AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML as named by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path. AJAX allows web page creators to take advantage of technologies such as XML, JavaScript, DHTML, and CSS in ways that make a web page and web site seem more dynamic with fewer page refreshes. It does this by taking advantage of requests and responses using HTTP.

Second interesting winner is JSON, Javascript Object Notation, an excellent alternative to XML data exchanging which become widely adopted not only in Javascript and AJAX applications but also in many others programming and scripting languages. Mixed with AJAX, JSON help to speed up AJAX applications :

JSON is catching a lot of attention with AJAX developers. Because JSON is a subset of JavaScript, and because AJAX is JavaScript at its core, the two work perfectly together. JSON can be navigated simply with the standard JavaScript being used by AJAX. This simplifies the processing of the data interchange tremendously. Combine the simplification of the syntax in comparison to XML with the ability to interface easier from AJAX code and you have a technology that again is going to catch the attention of a lot of developers.