Lots of interesting things are afoot, and I try to keep track of them. Here's what I'm watching.

Rails 3

Lots of new changes are coming with Rails 3, and it's pretty exciting. I wrote about some of the cool ones here. Rails is shaping up to be faster, more modular, and generally better and easier to work with. With all the smart people working on it, you don't have to look very hard to realize this is going to be a big release, and is only going to pull in more developers to this already great framework.

Sinatra 1.0

Blake Mizerany made the first commit to Sinatra in September of 2007, and since then it's picked up a lot of steam. It quickly became one of, if not the most popular micro-framework, even sticking its nose into the Rails world with Metal routers:

I personally love Sinatra. It's small, allows you make fast, simple (and even more complex) web applications, with minimal hassle. This blog runs on Sinatra, for example. Sinatra 1.0 will break some things, and hence **won't** be backwards compatible, but it cleans up the code and tightens up the API a bit, making it the best lean mean web application micro-framework machine. ## iPad I wrote about [why I won't be buying an iPad (yet)](http://blog.darkhax.com/2010/02/01/why-i-won-t-be-buying-an-ipad-yet) already, but that doesn't mean I don't care. It's a good looking device, HTML5 videos [play in the browser](http://twitter.com/peterc/status/8928582766) and it will allow me to sit comfortably in bed and do almost nothing, pushing the time I get out of bed on a Saturday further into the afternoon. I'm still excited about this device, but the big kicker for me is I really want it to have a camera. I'll wait for the 2nd generation. ## Ruby VM's For production ruby apps, there are really only a few VM options for stable results. There's the tried and true MRI, with versions 1.8.6, 1.8.7, and 1.9.1. You've got [Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE)](http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/), which is based on 1.8.7, giving you some performance and memory boosts, but seems to leave out some things, [continuations being one of them](http://twitter.com/lsegal/status/7293701988). JRuby is also an accepted stable VM and allows developers to run ruby applications (like Rails!) on the [Google App Engine](http://code.google.com/appengine/). Those are all fine and dandy, but there are other VM's on the way out the door that are shaping up to be, well, awesome. ### MagLev [MagLev](http://maglev.gemstone.com/) is coming from the depths of Smalltalk and as such the VM is built on years of Smalltalk VM experience. It also has an object persistence system so that multiple ruby application can access shared resources with the need of a separate database. It looks pretty slick, and I'm excited about it.

MagLev presentation at RailsConf 2008 from Monty Williams on Vimeo.

### Rubinius [Rubinius](http://rubini.us/) is written in C++ and leverages the [LLVM](http://llvm.org/) infrastructure to do all the hard work. It's almost at 1.0 status at the time of writing (there's a 1.0.0-rc2 out), and is pretty fast. It's gaining quite a following and once it hits 1.0 it will be a solid contender, possibly pushing out REE as 'the other ruby VM'. ### IronRuby [IronRuby](http://ironruby.net/), along with all the other 'Iron' languages (python, scheme, etc), is an implementation that runs on the .NET framework. This is just cool, because it brings the awesome that is ruby to the Windows world in ways that JRuby and regular ruby for Windows just don't. There's even a gem to allow other .NET languages [to be used inline](http://github.com/rvernagus/IronRubyInline). It'll never take over as a dominant VM, but it bridges the gap between ruby and the .NET world, allowing developers to use the best language to solve a problem, even if the problem requires different languages. IronRuby also allows ruby to be used in other .NET application, so you could write a C# app, and throw some ruby in. Sweet! ### MacRuby [MacRuby](http://www.macruby.org/) is for those running OS X Snow Leopard only, but it has its perks. It's built on technologies in the operating system, so you get the garbage collection system, [Grand Central Dispatch support](http://www.macruby.org/documentation/gcd.html), and HotCocoa support, so you can write 'native' Mac applications. You even get access to other objective-c frameworks, all for free. ## Go Programming Language Google's new [Go Programming Language](http://golang.org/) is pretty awesome. I haven't really got to play with it much, but the homepage informs you of the awesomeness: it's fast (to run and compile), safe, concurrent, and open source. It's billed as a systems programming language, meant for the same type of thing you'd use C for. There's lots of development happening with it, so it's moving fast. I am definitely going to leverage this language where appropriate.

OMG Rob Pike! *squeeee*

HipHop

While I try to avoid PHP whenever possible, new compiler technology is always cool. I'd like to try to compile Wordpress with HipHop and see what happens.

HTML5

HTML5 is shaping up to be a pretty good looking standard, at least on paper. I've dealt with a little bit of the new media tags (video and audio), and while I'm excited, they have to progress a bit more. The bonuses are that you don't need flash, so while videos don't play in Mobile Safari on the iPhone, they will open up directly in the video player. According to @peterc, they do play directly in the browser on the iPad.

The downside (and why it needs to progress) is that with flash, you do it once (although still with two different tags, embed and object), while with the video tag, you need two separate videos: one for Firefox, and one for Safari (Chrome will play either, apparently). Oh, and it doesn't work in Internet Explorer either, so there's that too.

HTML5 should end up pretty good, but it needs to mature, so I'll be watching it.

CSS3

HTML5 is cool, but I'm more excited about CSS3. There are some CSS3 things powering this blog, like the rounded corners, but it's still not quite CSS3. There is a -moz-border-radius property, a -webkit-border-radius, and finally a CSS3 border-radius. This is because CSS3 isn't finalized yet, and some of the selectors don't work in all browsers, so they have their own little selector to make it work. It's like IE Filters but not quite as bad, because at least they are based on things that will become standards. CSS3 should allow you to make some fancy looking things, much easier than before, and I'm excited.

Heroku

I ♥ Heroku. This blog runs on it, as well as a few other of my applications. I love it, and it's only getting better. I'm in the beta program, so I get to see fancy things before they go completely live, and I can't really talk about much of it here, except that there are some nice improvements coming. Frankly, unless your application has really specific needs, I can't see much of a reason to use any other hosting provider if you are using rocking a ruby rack based application.

Well that's it. That's some of the stuff I'm looking forward to. There are other things on my list, but I either can't think of all of them, or they aren't worth writing about right now.

What are you excited about?