My friend Jon asked me to post a whole bunch of links to "cool programmer stuff" so here it is. He is a Microsoft Fanboy, hence the .Net related stuff.
Objective Caml is a very cool functional/object-oriented/imperitive (in that order) language I am trying to pick up for when I need something to run fast (like monica), compared to be fun and easy (for which I use ruby). It is my first real foray into functional programming (since I missed the requisite Lisp course in college, having been an English major). I like it.
OJB and hibernate are about the coolest tools I have seen since the Servlet for big applications with more than two people working on em. I prefer OJB. OJB-NET is a port to the .Net platform. No idea how well it works, or if it is even really a port rather than an inspired-by.
Object Web has a bunch of cool projects. My favorite is C-JDBC which basically does database clustering at the JDBC (ODBC for you .Net fanboys) level. Pretty cool stuff, and *way* cheaper to use with PostgreSQL (0.0 +. (0.0 * 4.0)) dollars compared to (BIGNUM *. 4.0) for a big-iron clustered database. Not completely as functional as a clustered DB2 or Oracle, but it gives you the high-availability which is what I need it for.
OpenSymphony is impressing me a lot lately too. WebWork2 does a lot of the action-dispatch type web app stuff I had hoped to get out of Struts. OSCache is a wet dream for caching on a cluster. I think it was designed for caching JSP's of all the silly things, but it can be an arbitrary clustered cache really easily.I want to look into OSWorkFlow when I get a chance as workflow systems have a lot of potential for making lighter work of ever-changing, and never-reasonable, business-illogic. OSWorkFlow is by people whose code I trust, and is free (libre) what else can you ask for?
Since that seems so heavy on the Java side... Wait, it is really heavy on the java side. Okay, a bow to the .Net junky I am writing this for: F# looks to be a really cool OCaml based .Net language. If Microsoft would allow real ports of .Net it would probably crush Java. Is a shame when good technology is crippled by scared marketing departments.