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.

Netbeans, the cross-platform (Linux, Solaris, Mac, Windows) IDE and development platform built by Sun on the Java platform, and initiallly focusing on Java development, but now also actively supporting Ruby and Ruby on Rails (and their equivalent on the Java platform powered by JRuby) and C/C++, has reached version 6. It is now available in several bundles, each with a specific focus: Web and Java EE (with Glassfish and Tomcat part of the bundle), Mobility, Java SE, Ruby, C/C++. The complete bundle, with everything included, is also available.

During the development phase of this release, Netbeans has received positive press when compared to Eclipse, but also for its first-class Ruby support with completion and refactoring.

And as mentioned above, it is also a platform on which you can build your own rich applications.

Time to get it and check it for yourself!

jMaki is a client/server framework to ease development of Ajax applications, and it abstracts much of the javascript and CSS needed while covering several javascript libraries as Yahoo's YUI, Dojo and Scriptaculous. jMaki is made of both client side components (layout, client services and runtime as well as a widget model) and server side components ( server runtime and XmlHttpProxy).

Quickstart guides are available for Java and PHP, but efforts are also underway to make it available in Ruby on Rails

Version 1.0 of jMaki is now available for download.