  In this short review paper, we discuss some of the recent advances in the
field of parton fragmentation processes into hadrons as well as their possible
modifications in QCD media. Hadron production data in e+e-, deep inelastic
scattering and hadronic collisions are presented, together with global analyses
of fragmentation functions into light and heavy hadrons and developments on
parton fragmentation in perturbative QCD at small momentum fraction. Motivated
by the recent RHIC data indicating a significant suppression of large-pT hadron
production in heavy-ion collisions, several recent attempts to model
medium-modified fragmentation, e.g. by solving "medium" evolution equations or
through Monte Carlo studies, have been proposed and are discussed in detail.
Finally we mention the possibility to extract medium-modified fragmentation
functions using photon-hadron correlations.
