"Grails is a dynamic web-application framework built in Java and Groovy, leveraging best of breed APIs from the Java EE sphere including Spring, Hibernate and SiteMesh". This release features content negociation, REST and JNDI support. Worth checking if you're developing a website on the Java platform.

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.

JBoss, now part of Redhat, has released Seam 2, the web application development framework. Thsi is a major release with quite a few new things: conversational web services, Groovy support, hot deploy, Eclipse support and more. Gavin King, project lead, answered some questions at Infoq.

The Dojo foundation has released version 1.0 of the Dojo javascript toolkit. Dojo is one of the most complete javascript toolkit available, with of course ajax functionalities but also internationlisation, cryptography, offline capabilities and a widget system. It supports Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers.

It is used in products by AOL, BEA, IBM and Sun amongst others.

Graeme Rocher announced on his blog the release of Grails 0.6 with Rich Conversation Support thanks to the integration with Spring Webflow. This brings Seam-like rich conversations to Grails.

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.