Ruby on Rails, the famous web application framework which ignited Ruby's popularity surge, has now reached version 2.0, featuring some significant updates:

• Resources for RESTful development
• Multiview: the format of the template is now seperated from its rendering engine
• a module to work with HTTP Basic Authentication
• security enhancements
• ActiveRecord, the framework's ORM, saw significant performance improvements

and much more.

Cofundos "helps to realize bright ideas, by providing a platform for their discussion & enrichment and by establishing a process for organizing the contributions and interests of different stakeholders in the idea".
The idea is as follows: one can request development of new functionalities, and pledge funds to finance the realisation. Others can make offers of development, and set their price. People ready to pay some money then decide which developmebt offer they want to fund. When the development is done, the same people vote to validate the project and thus the payment.

Could this be a place to go to find side-projects to work on? Or are there already enough solutions?

Naked Object is a Java 5 framework that lets you develop your domain objects, and automatically generates the user interface (rich client or web based) and the database abstraction, based on Hibernate. Eclipse plugins are available to ease development. The Server Side has a good article describing the framework, released under the Apache License.

The OSBL's goal is "to provide an open solution that efficiently supports work processes in a business environment. It combines several well-known Open Source Java components in a way that allows for an easy and effective implementation of process-driven web applications.". It is available under the GPL, and offered under a commercial license for proprietary development.

Source: TheServerSide.

RedHat Developer Studio is a set of eclipse-based development tools that are pre-configured for JBoss Enterprise Middleware Platforms and Red Hat Enterprise Linux., available for both GNU/Linux and Windows systems.

If you're looking for a framework to develop web applications in Python, there's Django. The Django Master Class given duting this year's OSCON is available online with notes.

YSlow is a Firefox 2.0 add-on (requiring Firebug) rating the performance of a webpage based on Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team's best practices. It's been developed by Yahoo and is available under the MPL with parts under the BSD license.

Webkit, the HTML engine developed by Apple for its Safari browser, and based on KHTML, will be integrated in Trolltec's Qt library.

The effort, started in may, and located at llrp.org, produces the LLRP toolkit under the Apache 2 license, and proposes solutions for several languages. It got the support of several organisations, including IBM and the University of Arkansas. the latter is home of the TagCentric project, a basic open source Java-based RFID middleware toolkit.

Version 0.7 of the LLRP Toolkit was released on july 20, and is available for download from Sourceforge.

A first version of IronRuby is now available under Microsoft's short Permissive License. More info in John Lam's blog.