Jolt Awards 2005

2005-03-17

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)