New Relic RPM is an on-demand performance management solution for web applications developed in Java, Ruby, or JRuby. RPM now provides real-time monitoring and metrics for applications running Sinatra, Rack and Rails Metals.

Hobo is an open source rapid development toolkit for Ruby on Rails, which claims to help developers build anything from throwaway prototypes to meticulously crafted full-blown web apps in a fraction of the time it takes with conventional tools. Hobo has now officially reached Version 1.0 after three years of focused development effort.

BitNami RubyStack provides an integrated, ready to run distribution of the beta release of Ruby on Rails 3 and all of its dependencies. BitNami RubyStack is available as a native installer, a virtual appliance and an Amazon Machine Image, so it can be deployed natively, virtually or in the cloud in just a few clicks.

New Relic RPM is a subscription-based application performance management solution for web applications developed in Ruby on Rails or Java. It has has announced the opening of a public beta program for the latest version of its RPM product. The new version can be used to monitor, troubleshoot and tune Java web applications in addition to those developed on Ruby on Rails. RPM claims to be the industry’s first Application Performance Management (APM) product to be offered as a service.

The results of a survey by Evans Data shows that use of the Ruby scripting language has increased by 40% amongst North American software developers during the last year.  Fourteen percent of developers in this region use Ruby some part of the time, up from 10% who used it in 2008. Additionally, 20% of developers expect to use it in the coming year.

The Parrot Foundation has released Parrot 1.0, the first in a series of “Supported” releases. The Parrot virtual machine hosts dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP, and Perl. In addition to standard features expected of any modern virtual machine — including concurrency, garbage collection, bytecode and JIT compilation, event and exception handling, Unicode, dynamic dispatch, and support for procedural, object-oriented, and functional paradigms — Parrot provides a powerful suite of compiler tools tailored to dynamic languages and a next generation regular expression engine.

“Dynamic languages have become a hot topic for commercial and academic R&D,” said Allison Randal, Architect of Parrot and Chairman of the Parrot Foundation, “and Parrot has been right at the heart of it from the beginning. 1.0 marks an important milestone for the project, where we can invite a broad community of developers to explore the cutting-edge features we’ve enjoyed for years.”

Parrot VM 1.0.0 is available on Parrot’s FTP site, or follow the download instructions.