To me, the most significant developments were Rails and the Perl responses to it. I, too, am very interested in Jifty - that Jesse's heavily involved is a big plus in our book and I can't wait to see the continuations in action. The ORM also looks a lot like ActiveRecord, which is good.
Other than that, it's all personal achievements - two articles on perl.com, a new job that I actually like, and a deeper OSS involvement all around. It's been a good year. :-)
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?