Anil posted Web Development Trends for 2006 and highlighted one amazing gem that was not on my radar: ECMAScript for XML (E4X).

This standard brings native support for XML into javascript. E4X enables us to tap XML data as conveniently as perl's hashes and arrays. It is already supported in Rhino, further encouraging me to bet the house on using javascript on the server side in the future.

Some of the goodies I saw in the ECMAScript for XML Specification include:

• tight syntax for accessing element and attribute data
• the ability to rapidly move back and forth between using xml text and using the native xml data type (Cold Fusion first made this sort of thing easy)
• evaluation of javascript within the xml text (allowing for simple templating)
• convenient CRUD access to xml elements and attributes
• searching and filtering of XML data
• for each (in order of) looping