Sun hired Ted Leung and Frank Wierzbicki, two key Python developers, which should further help dynamic languages on the Java platform, and the Jython project. After the success with the JRuby project, and with Sun's CEO talking of future open source related acquisitions, some see PHP as a next candidate.

A 6 year period without release has come to an end for Jython with the 2.2 release. Jython is a Java implementation of Python, Jython 2.2 bringing the features of Python 2.2. After hibernating, the project seems to be a live again, with work on Python 2.3 , 2.4 and 2.5 already begun.

On a related note, Jruby saw its 1.0.1 release, a maintenance release.

Version 3.0 of Plone has been released, after more than a year development. It features Full versioning suppor, Ajax, an upgraded content editor, wiki support and multiple markups, OpenID support, and full-text indexing of Word/PDF.

Plone is a ready to run CMS built on the Zope application server. As such, it stores its contents in Zope's built in transactional object database, the ZODB. Plone is available for Linux, Mac, Windows and other platforms.

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.