Jolt Awards 2005
Every year, CMP Media (owners of DDJ, Software Development, and many other fine magazines) hand out Jolt awards in various categories. This year's winners are listed below, with some comments. There's also a new award for exceptional writing in technology and letters, created in honor of Stan Kelly-Bootle (who earned the world's first graduate degree in computer science in 1954).
| Books: General | Head First Design Patterns by Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra (O'Reilly) | [GVW: look extremely fluffy, but once you get into it, there's actually a lot of good material] |
| Books: Technical | Better, Faster, Lighter Java by Bruce A. Tate and Justin Gehtland (O'Reilly) | [GVW: I wasn't that impressed] |
| Business Integration and Data Tools | EnterpriseTenFold (TenFold) | |
| Change and Configuration Management Tools | Subversion 2004 (CollabNet) | |
| Design Tools | Smart Development Environment 2.0 (Visual Paradigm International) | |
| Languages and Development Environments | Eclipse 3.0 (Eclipse Foundation) | |
| Libraries, Frameworks and Components | Hibernate 2.1 (JBoss) | [GVW: my students and I found it to have a very steep learning curve last fall] |
| Management Tools | CaliberRM 2005 (Borland) | |
| Mobile Development Tools | J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2 (Sun Microsystems) | |
| Security | Source Code Analysis 3.0 (Fortify Software) | |
| Test -- Automated Test Tools | Agitar Agitator and Dashboard 2.0 (Agitar) | |
| Test -- Defect Tracking Tools | FogBugz 3.1 (Fog Creek Software) | [GVW: produced by Joel Spolsky's company --- there's a book out on it now] |
| Utilities | Captivate 2004 (Macromedia) | |
| Web Development Tools | Macromedia Flex 1.5 (Macromedia) | |
| Websites and Developer Networks | The O'Reilly Network (O'Reilly) | |
| Hall of Fame: | InstallShield (Macrovision) | |