CouchDB was probably the most interesting since it had iterative map reduce, but I ended up abandoning it for MongoDB because it was much faster.
The second best is Mako. A month or two ago I switched from using Django for templating to Mako. Depending on the composition of the pages there was a 2-6x speed improvement, the code got significantly cleaner since special tags/filters weren't needed for basic opertions like less-than or modulo. Also, the ease of creating custom tags in Mako made me more willing to create them and drastically reduced code complexity.
The best technology I first used this year was jQuery. As someone who knew ECMAScript extremely well and JavaScript a bit it made me an order of magnitude more productive and made things possible that I would have been too frustrated to complete otherwise. It immediately seemed natural to work with the DOM using set operations. And it has tons of plugins which are just as easy to use. This is one of the best designed libraries I've ever used. I hope using it will act as an introduction to functional programming to people who might have otherwise been scared of it.
The second best is Mako. A month or two ago I switched from using Django for templating to Mako. Depending on the composition of the pages there was a 2-6x speed improvement, the code got significantly cleaner since special tags/filters weren't needed for basic opertions like less-than or modulo. Also, the ease of creating custom tags in Mako made me more willing to create them and drastically reduced code complexity.
The best technology I first used this year was jQuery. As someone who knew ECMAScript extremely well and JavaScript a bit it made me an order of magnitude more productive and made things possible that I would have been too frustrated to complete otherwise. It immediately seemed natural to work with the DOM using set operations. And it has tons of plugins which are just as easy to use. This is one of the best designed libraries I've ever used. I hope using it will act as an introduction to functional programming to people who might have otherwise been scared of it.