This post comes at a very interesting time. I'm a non-developer. I did graduate with a computing science degree, but really struggled getting to grips with programming and software development, so when i left uni i never created any of my own apps. I did retain some simple software development principles knowledge however.

But recently, i've been very keen to get involved in helping developers on my team improve the user experience of our apps, which is why i started looking into cappuccino.

Atlas and Cappuccino, I have to say are great as frameworks, but only for people with Macs.

So, since then i've been heavily looking into jQuery and found it to be great for helping me create good user experiences, and with the addition of AJAX things tend to get very interesting.

I'm in no position to comment on what i think to future is since im so new to development, but from where im standing and certainly for someone that is just entering the fore, i'm someone that has been through these exact set of questions in the last few weeks, and came to a very similar conclusion through my own trial and error.