Today's NetNewsWire tab sweep:

• DataMapper - Competition for ActiveRecord - Not available at the moment, cached on the Googles.
  Looks like a nice alternative to ActiveRecord, especially for standalone environments without Rails. Being able to put queries, especially simpler ones, in Ruby code is quite appealing.

• The Great Ruby Shoot-Out
  Antonio Cangiano compared the current Ruby implementations. JRuby, Ruby 1.9 and Rubinius look awesome, at least by the numbers.

• Upcoming Changes to the JavaScript Language
  I'm still not sure if I'm gonna like what's coming. JavaScript is on the way to turning into a full-blown and statically typed object-oriented language, but with all its pros and cons. It looks a lot like C++, and if that's no a little bit scary, I don't know what is.

• Google Chart API
  Now that's a really useful API. Put in your data via HTTP request and get back chart images. Awesome.

• SVNMate
  A TextMate plugin to integrate Subversion, taking the integration further than the Subversion bundle.

• Rak
  grep in Ruby, ignores .svn and CVS directories. Accepts regular expression in Ruby syntax, and can execute Ruby code on the results.

• The Evolution of Java
  Right on.

On a side node, Rails 2.0 has been released. I recommend checking out the PeepCode book on Rails 2.0 to check what's new and what's old.

Update: Ryan Daigle (author of aforementioned book) also has a nice collection on a lot of the changes and new features in Rails 2.0.