Ruby on Rails version 0.10.0 was just announced with some cool stuff like web services support (both client and server, both SOAP and XML-RPC). More akward syntax for me to learn, though, since I've yet to do any real work with Ruby itself, let alone Rails. But I'd love to!

On a related note, Dion "Groovy Fan #1" Almaer is fantasizing about having Ruby as a scripting language in web browsers. I'd say it would be a lot more feasible idea to put Java on the client-side. In the end, we already have Java plug-ins so the leap wouldn't be that big to enable Java as a semi-standard scripting language for manipulating the DOM tree...