25 highly anticipated open-source releases coming this year

The new project, to be called Rails 3, will incorporate some key Merb features and concepts, including its agnosticism about object-relational models, JavaScript libraries and template languages. Rails 3 will also be more modular, letting developers opt in or out of specific components. It'll have significant performance improvements and will gain a defined public API.

According to the Rails blog, the "overly optimistic" date for the Rails 3 beta is for the Rails Conference in early May, but it'll be worth paying attention to whenever it arrives.

The Dojo Toolkit is a one-stop shop for developers creating dynamic Web applications, especially for those who don't want to become gods of DHTML and JavaScript. Dojo 1.3, now in RC1 and expected to be final very soon, has a collection of fast and concise DOM manipulation APIs, a more configurable NodeList class, a brand-new lightning-fast CSS Selector query engine, and new widgets and components.

The Dojo Toolkit. Click to view larger image.

Moonlight is an open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight, a browser plug-in for streaming video and Internet apps. The result of a technical collaboration between Microsoft and Novell Inc. and related to the open-source .Net implementation Mono Project, Moonlight is primarily for Linux and other Unix/X11-based operating systems.

The Moonlight community has access to Microsoft's test suites for Silverlight and distributes a media pack for Linux users with licensed media codecs for video and audio. Moonlight 1.0 was just released in February, and work is already under way on Version 2, to keep it in sync with Silverlight.

Watching the presidential inauguration via Moonlight. Click to view larger image.

(You might also keep an eye on Moonshine, a Firefox browser plug-in and desktop player that works with Moonlight to play Windows Media content in Linux.)

In fact, it's worth calling attention to Microsoft's active open-source involvement simply because so few imagined that Microsoft would ever show up at the party. Among the successes is IronPython, a Python implementation designed to run on .Net and Mono; Version 2 was released in February. Now that that's done, the team can turn its attention to an IronPython version to support Python 3.0. While the team is vague about a release date ("after 2.x is out the door," according to a spokesperson), it will likely arrive sometime this year.

Microsoft also created IronRuby, a Ruby implementation for .Net, and the Dynamic Language Runtime, a set of shared services for implementing dynamic languages on .Net. All three projects are distributed under the terms of the Microsoft Public License.

Also worth watching:

• The MariaDB project, a community-developed branch of the MySQL database using the Maria storage engine; the brainchild of Michael "Monty" Widenius, founder of MySQL AB and Monty Program AB.
• CodeIgniter 2.0, a PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant tool kit to create full-featured Web applications. (While Version 2.0 hasn't exactly been announced, you can pre-order a book about it on Amazon. Hmmm.)
• Eclipse Galileo, a coordinated release of different Eclipse projects, due to ship at the end of June 2009.