Ruby really has had a great year. All us fanboys can now say "I told you so".

Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0 were great milestones.

Also the community has flourished. We lost _why (sniff) and Zed (don't let the door hit you...) but some great folk really came out of the woodwork to make Rails 3.0 awesome:

Aaron Patterson

Jose Valim

some Carlhuda guy

And a hundred others. I used to enjoy watching the Rails/Merb catfights, but this strong community is so much better to have.

"some Carlhuda guy"

:)) funnieast thing ever! "Carlhuda" actually its a name under witch Carl Lerche and Yehuda Katz commit their work when they do pair programming.

Santiago Pastorino too. He went from his first contribution to Rails to being on Rails core all within this year.

Absolutely. He's at the top of the "hundreds others" :). I just mentioned those three because I use their non-rails code too all the time.

Also of note are the great screencasters/podcasters like Gregg Pollock, Ryan Bates, Jason Seifer, Dan Benjamin, and it feels like I'm forgetting someone else...

>it feels like I'm forgetting someone else...

Peter Cooper? :)

Another thing that I associate with this year is the spreading awareness of ORM and framework agnosticism. With the popularity of Sinatra and MongoDB, along with other Rack frameworks and non-AR DB libraries, there seems to be a big shift toward web-related libraries that are Rack-centric rather than Rails-centric.

Regarding Padrino: when it was released earlier this year I initially didn't think much of it, but after playing with it recently I believe it definitely has the potential to be another great Ruby web framework. It's already very usable and extremely pleasant to work with.

Almost all the people I know (Including myself) who use Sinatra were more willing to use Padrino than Rails.