With so much different things being said about the Microsoft announcement to support ODF, it is good that there are guys like David Berlind of ZDNet who spit out the whole story, and particularly the story behind the story, in his article The Microsoft/ODF Day After: Almost everyone gets it wrong.
The bottom line is that companies who will use Microsoft Office together with this third-party Microsoft funded plug-in for ODF should ask themselves: "when something goes wrong, who are we gonna call ?" ...
In this Web 2.0 Journal article, a long-time Java developer describes his experiences (and frustrations) in moving from Java to JavaScript to develop Web 2.0 and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications.
First of all, there are no great integrated development environments for JavaScript, at least not of the same level as those for Java or C#. Furthermore, debugging is a pain and most people resort to printf-like debugging, although there are browser-specific debuggers such as Venkman for Firefox and Microsoft Script Debugger for IE.
The good news is that we are still learning how to build JavaScript-based applications and that the tools are improving. Furthermore, most of the best practices in software development still hold, such as the use of libraries so that you don't have to reinvent (and redebug) the wheel, the use of unit testing, and the use of patterns. One site that deserves a lot of attention if you are developing Web 2.0 applications is AjaxPatterns.org.