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Young upstarts challenge the industry's leading products, books and websites. By Rosalyn Lum
June 01, 2005
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/joltawards/fresh-faces/184415340
On March 16, 2005, the 15th Annual Jolt and Productivity Award winners were announced at SD West 2005, recognizing 15 Jolt winners and 45 Productivity winners for books, products and websites that have "jolted" the industry. Editor in Chief Alexandra Weber Morales and I presided over the ceremony, which honored new entrants and old standbys, with a preponderance of fresh faces at the front of the queue.
From a field of 300 entrants narrowed down to 90 finalists, eight of the 13 Jolt winners (excluding the two book categories) had never captured the coveted Lucite-encased Jolt can, only three are repeat Jolt winners, one had previously won a Productivity Award, and one had been nominated in 2003, but hadn't received an award.
O'Reilly was the big winner this year, capturing Jolts in both book categories and the Website and Developer Networks category, as well as two Productivity Awards. "O'Reilly really cares about and works on learning; the company approaches technical material from a variety of directions to accommodate various learning styles," says Rick Wayne, Software Development's New and Noteworthy editor and Jolt judge. Gary Pollice concurs: "I think they've 'jolted' the way we look at books by bringing fairly technical topics to people in a way that will help them learn."
Besides reading great books, judges also get to add tools that impress them to their permanent library, such as Agitar's Agitator and Dashboard 2.0 for automated testing. Judges who found themselves using Agitator regularly for testing were "very impressed."
But this year saw some challenges due to the products' increased complexity, installations and documentation. "The products that I was most impressed by were easy to install and get running," says judge Andrew Binstock. "Macromedia's products are prime examples." The other judges agreed: Macromedia also won two Jolts and two Productivity Awards.
Changing Markets, New Categories
This year, more first-time entries challenged the previous year's incumbents than ever before, and we're finding that certain niches warrant new categories. For example, Project Management Tools became Management Tools this year to include analysis and portfolio management entries, and Design and Analysis Tools was renamed Design Tools to accommodate the growing number of products in that field. This constant refinement also extended to Testing Tools: This year, we distinguished between Automated Testing Tools and Defect Tracking Tools.
Software Development judges evaluated entrants in 15 categories: Books (General); Books (Technical); Business Integration and Data Tools, Change and Configuration Management Tools; Design Tools; Languages and Development Environments; Libraries, Frameworks and Components; Mobile Development Tools; Management Tools; Security Tools; Automated Testing Tools; Defect Tracking Tools; Utilities; Web Development Tools; and Websites and Developer Networks. One product in each category received the coveted Jolt Award, while the three runners-up were honored with a Productivity Award plaque.
The Esteemed Judges
Software Development thanks these 26 gurus for
dedicating three months to the evaluation process.
Coming Next Month:
Coverage of the inaugural Stan Kelly-Bootle Eclectech Award, presented at the Jolt Award ceremony.
Steve Bourne, author of the Bourne shell for Unix and a past president of the ACM, accepted the award on Stan Kelly-Bootle's behalf.
Software Development
BOOKS: GENERAL
Glenn Bisignani, Product Marketing Manager
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Head First Design Patterns
Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates
and Kathy Sierra
(O'Reilly, 2004)
You know that old, cynical saying, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach"? Rubbish. Teaching is a gift, as anyone who has ever been inspired by a brilliant mentor knows, and the Head First series created by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates is an iridescent example of how to turn complex theory into life-changing action. A tremendous homage and adjunct to the Gang of Four's classic Design Patterns, Head First Design Patterns is written, appropriately enough, by a team of two elite subject matter experts (Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman) and two masters of metacognition (Sierra and Bates). This work easily enters that small canon of visually and intellectually stimulating books that include Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think.
Chapter 1 leads you oh-so-craftily into a perfect understanding of the Strategy pattern—as with all good teaching, you don't realize you've learned it until the very end, along with new insights into the limitations of inheritance. Before you know it, two chapters later, you've mastered the Observer and Decorator patterns, too. But the book doesn't just iterate through the patterns until you've gotten them; it's packed with exercises, visual humor, clever games and sidebars that keep the conversation between this book and your brain going. Finally, the pragmatism behind Head First Design Patterns is ever-present, culminating in tips on how to communicate patterns to others and define your own. For once, your brain is begging you: Read this book!
—Alexandra Weber Morales
Productivity
Award Winners |
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Joel on Software A coherent collection of essays (initially published on his eponymous blog) about managing software development and making money from the results, Joel on Software is one man's idiosyncratic, occasionally cantankerous take on our business. From the famous 12-step "Joel Test" for evaluating development teams ("Do you use version control? Do you run daily builds?") to his indictment of the process mavens in our industry, Spolsky delivers his opinions in an erudite, closely reasoned and wickedly funny style that will surely stimulate your thoughts and cause you to question your assumptions, even when you disagree.
What's most unusual about Joel is how he manages to promote his own company and products to such a loyal and accepting audience. Executives at Sun and other big ISVs, take note: If you want blog readers, you've got to dish the way Joel does! To everyone else: Get the book, curl up in a chair, and enjoy yourself.
—Rick Wayne |
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Refactoring to Patterns The Gang of Four gave us Design PatternsRefactoring, and Joshua Kerievsky unites the two in Refactoring to Patterns, with a clear explanation of their relationship and combined potential.
Extreme Programming teams incorporate refactoring, the practice of refining code to make it clearer and more maintainable, as part of their daily routine. To remove "code smells," you must refactor with a purpose, and Kerievsky takes a purposeful look at the types of refactoring you might make, showing you how to implement design patterns in your approach. Expert programmers do this instinctively, but Refactoring to Patterns is for the rest of us.
This thought-provoking book will change the way you approach both your initial design and refactoring: Every software developer should have Refactoring to Patterns on their bookshelves.
—Gary Pollice |
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Software Factories "This book may be the one we look back on to say 'Wow, they had it right, way back in 2004.'" This comment from our judging discussion precisely captures the ambivalence that kept Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks and Tools from taking the top award. On one hand, we agreed that Greenfield et al. were on to something important. What split the field was the feeling of how important software factories—sets of integrated tools, process and content assets used to accelerate lifecycle tasks for a specific type of software component—will be. Some felt that factories will become a major concept in corporate development; others felt that the book didn't make the case. Certainly, architects and technical leads with an interest in Microsoft's strategy will find this book compelling. Those hoping for a platform-neutral advocacy remain unconvinced.
—Larry O'Brien |
Software Development
SECURITY TOOLS
Barmak Meftah, VP, Engineering Arthur Do, Founder/Chief Architect
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Source Code Analysis 3.0
Fortify Software
If I were in the marketing group of Palo Alto, Calif.–based Fortify Software, I'd have given this product a more hardball name, like Stonewall, Ironsides or Kevlar++. Why? Because this product can bulletproof your code against typical exploits such as buffer overflows or cross-scripting ploys.
The suite analyzes C, C++, Java, JSP, PL/SQL, C# and XML files, alone or grouped within an application, with a remarkable degree of understanding about what the code's doing in the context of the application. In addition to the typical buffer overflows, its user-extensible rules detect situations that spot-check manual security reviews often overlook.
Source Code Analysis 3.0 pinpoints security vulnerabilities throughout the code base, across processes, tiers and language boundaries. After-the-fact security audits can also be run at any time through the whole project.
The depth of the analysis can be a shock, but continued use will markedly change the way a team writes any new piece of code, because team members begin to anticipate what kinds of code the suite will pounce on. Over the long term, then, not only does this product buttress an organization's code, it also ups the game of developers themselves—a rare combination. Have security fears for your tiers? Then get Fortify-ed.
—Roland Racko
Productivity
Award Winners |
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CounterPoint 1.0 Back in 1975, when the killer shark of the movie classic Jaws scared the popcorn out of moviegoers' hands, seafood restaurants around the country put up signs saying "Get Even. Eat a Fish." CounterPoint, from Austin, Tex.–based Mirage Networks, takes the same let-me-at-'em attitude toward network intruders. Clever manipulation of the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) renders denial of service attacks, worms, scans and other rapidly progressing threats completely ineffective. Or, it can lure hacker types to sludge pots of slow response, impeding their reconnaissance of network assets.
CounterPoint does all this without needing software agents on workstations or servers, and without introducing any latencies in the network. Its administration interface is fast and lean, in keeping with its deadly seriousness.
—Roland Racko |
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ISA Server 2004 Microsoft's Internet Security and Acceleration Server may not be for dummies, but it is made simple. This advanced application-layer firewall, virtual private network (VPN) and Web cache solution improves network security and performance. We especially appreciated its simplified administration user interface that helps administrators avoid common security configuration errors through templates and wizards, context-sensitive task panes, advanced troubleshooting tools and an intuitive policy model that prevent configuration errors.
Don't be fooled by its ease of use—ISA is backed by tried-and-true technology that protects against a complex array of security threats through both stateful packet inspection and application-layer filtering of Internet protocols such as HTTP, VPN, SMTP, POP3, DNS, H.323, streaming media and RPC traffic.
—John Lam |
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POPFile .22.2 POPFile is an open-source e-mail classification software that can filter messages into predefined categories, including a spam folder for spam filtering. It works with almost any operating system and e-mail client because it's written in Perl and runs a client-independent POP proxy. You can run POPFile as a local proxy on your PC for personal use or run it on a server for a group of users.
The POPFile e-mail-filtering proxy retrieves messages from your existing e-mail servers and then classifies them by adding additional information to the subject line or to the header. The e-mail clients retrieve the classified messages from the POPFile proxy; then POPFile automatically saves the messages to predefined folders based on the classification information in the subject or header. As with any other Bayesian-based filters, you need to manually train POPFile.
—Michael Yuan |
Software Development
TEST: AUTOMATED TOOLS
Mark de Visser, VP of Marketing Alberto Savoia, CTO and VP of Engineering Roongko Doong, Ph.D., VP of Technology
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Agitator and Dashboard 2.0
Agitar
To truly unit-test code, you must review every line, every branch, and every outcome—a huge combinatorial task that can be attempted only with automation. Run it through the Agitator and it comes out spanking clean. Agitar, based in Mountain View, Calif., raises the bar in how we'll look at testing tools in the future with the release of its Agitator product and accompanying management dashboard. The combination of features in this product makes it easy to run tests—lots of tests—on your Java code.
Unlike most other automated test tools, Agitator is easy to use—simply point it at your code, a method, class or complete project, and let it loose. The tool analyzes a program and selects data that it determines will effectively exercise the methods in the program. It then finds boundary conditions and data values that will exercise all conditions and branches, and it does it quickly. It generated and ran almost 1,600 tests on a class in less than 10 seconds.
Dashboard lets project members and management quickly view test results and gather other metrics, such as the complexity of a body of code. This is one new, jolting product that I've already added to my toolchest.
—Gary Pollice
Productivity
Award Winners |
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LISA 2.5 Look, Ma, no hands! Based in Southlake, Texas, iTKO presents LISA 2.5, a point-and-click unit, regression, load and performance enterprise-strength automated testing solution for J2EE applications, websites and Web services.
As is expected with any rich, diverse tool that interfaces with many technologies, the user interface isn't simple, but is certainly worth the time it takes to learn how to use the product. LISA performs "inline testing" technology to test all components. Its wizards help testing novices connect to, analyze and interact with live EJBs, databases, messaging layers and Web services/SOAP objects to produce effective tests of several types of software, though this simplicity can be awkward for programmers. I like this tool—it has the potential to become a great product, though it's currently a little too fresh. I'm looking forward to seeing it next year.
—Gary Pollice |
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Parasoft Jtest 5.1 Jtest is a hungry little beast. Feed it your Java project, and it'll chew it to pieces as it automates Java unit testing and coding standard analysis.
Don't take it personally when Jtest cites you for some of the 400+ Java coding standards rules it knows in 24 separate categories, including J2ME, J2EE and Scott Ambler's Java Coding Style Standards, Threads and Synchronization, as well as Unused Code—and you can add your own rules, too. But it also can be your best friend, automatically correcting more than 200 of those violations with its Quick Fix feature and automatically generating JUnit tests for you. It's not a stretch to say that Monrovia, Calif.–based Parasoft has a product that can replace one test person on your project.
The current version supports Eclipse 2.1 and 3.X and WSAD 5.X.
—Gary Evans |
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TestComplete 3.0
AutomatedQA When it comes to automated testing tools, it's hard not to be impressed with TestComplete, Las Vegas–based AutomatedQA's comprehensive testing solution for Windows.
Like most automation tools, TestComplete supports the recording and playback of applications under test. These recordings can be viewed and edited as scripts in five different programming dialects. The test development environment has all the features you'd expect for script editing, including syntax highlighting, collapsible code and code completion. More importantly, TestComplete's Object Browser can delve into some program details with great specificity.
With TestComplete, you can construct and manage complex test suites with access to many of the same capabilities found in much more expensive testing tools. TestComplete 3 is a winner.
—Robert DelRossi |
Software Development
TEST: DEFECT-TRACKING TOOLS
Michael Pryor, President/Founder Joel Spolsky, CEO
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FogBugz
Fog Creek Software
In the oh-so-pedestrian world of bug-tracking software, the Big Apple's FogBugz is ... different. With Microsoft IIS, e-mail and a simple database, FogBugz hides complexity behind simplicity, adroitly managing three types of cases: feature requests, defect reports and inquiries from either customers or internal stakeholders. Cases can be entered into the central database through the FogBugz Web interface or via an e-mail account set up for this purpose. FogBugz automatically inserts a case number into an e-mail subject line and sends out an alert. When the recipient responds, FogBugz inserts it into the appropriate case, creating a record of the entire interaction right in FogBugz, even if multiple people on your end have responded. FogBugz's view on workflow is decidedly laid back—you can have it your way, or any way. If a programmer gets a defect report that needs to go to another code jockey, he just reassigns it.
—Gary Evans
Productivity
Award Winners |
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Census 6.0 Companies and projects looking for quality and control of their process keep track of the feedback they get from their users and their internal operations. This generally leads to the deployment of heterogeneous (if not home-grown) software solutions for tracking bugs, feature requests, support calls and timesheets. If you're seeking an integrated solution that will help you manage all these aspects efficiently, take a look at Census, from the Montreal, Canada–based MetaQuest.
Built for the Windows platform, Census offers all the expected standard features, such as e-mail notifications and support for project lifecycle and components; and adds many advanced features, including customizable workflows, version control integration and reporting. Moreover, it is Web-based, which means seamless access for all users.
—David Dossot |
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JIRA 3.0 My famously late-adopting office-mate, the Finn, tracks his current project's bugs with a pad of paper. Oh, I've set him up with several tools, but he's found them cumbersome, his patience expires, and the pad soon re-emerges.
I'm going to try him out on Atlassian's JIRA. It's clean. It's sufficiently full-featured to get developers the info they need, yet perfectly usable by nontechnical personnel with a Web browser. You can deploy it on any platform that runs a Java servlet container. It handles bug reports, feature requests and tasks with equal aplomb, and you can set it up with fine-grained permissions for various user classes as necessary. It's scriptable via SOAP, XML-RPC and REST, so that we can integrate it into our existing processes and set up whatever notifications we need.
However Sydney, Australia–based Atlassian releases so often that it's pointless to talk about "new features." By the time you read this, JIRA is already better.
—Rick Wayne |
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OnTime 2004 OnTime 2004 for Web & Windows is a full-featured defect tracking and feature management solution from Scottsdale, Ariz.–based Axosoft. OnTime's features are provided in Windows or Web versions, and teams can use both simultaneously. The product's commitment to flexibility is evident in its support for unlimited attachments, filters and customer-defined fields. OnTime is written as 100 percent .NET, and the Axosoft Web Services SDK allows .NET developers to integrate defect reporting and feature request capabilities into existing applications. Coupling OnTime with Axosoft's PowerTrack Visual Studio Add-In allows developers to access their OnTime data without ever leaving the Visual Studio environment. The 2005 versions sport new product names, plus some nifty new features.
—Gary Evans |
Software Development
UTILITIES
Magnus Nirell, Manager, Software Engineering
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Captivate 2004
Macromedia
Capturing screenshots of your applications—or better yet, actual video—is fundamental to product documentation and promotion. And there's no better choice for this work than Captivate 2004, an extremely feature-rich utility by San Francisco–based Macromedia.
Captivate goes well beyond making simple screen movies. You can add synchronized audio narrations and apply a variety of different highlighting techniques. You can even build walk-throughs that let your users experience what it's like to use your program. The program's storyboard interface arranges your recordings as a series of slides that logically separate major portions of the action. You can easily edit the activity on a single slide without having to rerecord an entire session.
When you're done, Captivate can publish your work as either a stand-alone EXE or a Flash SWF file that can be easily incorporated onto a Web page. There's also support for exporting the various storyboard slides into Word, forming the basis of end-user documentation.
Perhaps most importantly, Captivate 2004 does it all unobtrusively and without much of a learning curve. Sexy? No. But Macromedia Captivate 2004 represents the best in utilities for 2004.
—Robert DelRossi
Productivity
Award Winners |
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devAdvantage 2.1 Want to perfect your C# code? DevAdvantage 2.1, from Evanston, Ill.–based Anticipating Minds, is an automated code-review tool that analyzes .NET C# code and automatically fixes many of the problems found. DevAdvantage integrates with Visual Studio as a .NET add-in, with integrated menu, help and undo support. It performs static analysis of your C# code, applying predefined rules on Design, Error Handling, Naming Conventions, .NET Usage, Performance and Threading—or you can define your own.
Handy explanations clarify cryptic violations and those requiring human intervention. DevAdvantage then guides you through each step of the correction. A free Community Edition is available, providing specialized subsets of rules evaluation. All rules are included in the Professional Edition. All in all, devAdvantage helps your code approach perfection.
—Gary Evans |
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OmeaPro 1.0 Can't find that got-to-have-today file that you stored in a perfectly logical place? Well, look no further than Prague, in the Czech Republic—JetBrains' OmeaPro may be the lost car keys-finder you've always hoped for. OmeaPro is your single interface to your entire world of data—or resources, in OmeaPro-speak. On the Web side, it manages RSS and ATOM feeds, and provides NNTP support for reading and posting to newsgroups. On the workstation, OmeaPro lets you organize and index your resources the way you want to: Now you can search multiple ways for everything related to "Acme Corporation" and get proposals, quotes, contracts and object models returned for selection. One of the product's to-die-for features is associating files and other resources with OmeaPro tasks. You create a task, say "Write a Product Review," and voilà! You can populate that task with notes, bookmarks to Web pages, e-mails and IMs, screenshots—all kinds of stuff.
—Gary Evans |
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Quest JProbe 5.2 Quest's JProbe is an old friend to Jolt aficionados, and with good reason. As long as Java remains an interpreted language with a big class library, heavy runtime checking and built-in memory management, it will be way too easy to write sloppy, resource-hogging programs. JProbe optimizes the way it's supposed to be done. You write your code. You make your best algorithm and speed/space trade-offs. Then you point JProbe's analyzers at the result, and hunt down the hogs in their wallows.
JProbe covers the gamut of corporate Java development on just about every platform of interest. The profiler lets you detect cycle sinks; the memory profiler ferrets out leaks and bloat; the thread analyzer can show up deadlocks and race conditions; the coverage analyzer pinpoints where you need to pay more attention to testing.
Think you've written tight Java code? After pointing JProbe at it, you'll be sure.
—Rick Wayne |
Software Development
WEB DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
David Wadhwani, VP, Engineering
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Macromedia Flex 1.5
Macromedia
Although impressive and fully functional implementations of DHTML-based user interfaces such as Google Maps are becoming increasingly common, Web developers often feel like the whole JavaScript/CSS model of Web user interfaces is being pushed to its limits to make sure that everything works in every browser. For a time, Java applets were the answer. Performance problems, overly protective security patches and differences in the way controls are rendered squashed that idea. But wouldn't it be nice to start over and design a truly platform-independent model for Web UIs—and while you're at it, how about integrating it with an application server?
This is just what Macromedia's done with its new Flex presentation server. Macromedia Flex is a server component that uses XML code to generate Flash swf user interfaces. Flex contains an extensive library of components, including visual user interface components, data models and remote service controls. The only software required on the client side is a browser with the Flash player installed.
Macromedia is probably the only company with the goodwill and installed base to attempt such a bold reinvention of the Web application. The only thing keeping Flex from exploding from a niche server into a new standard is its steep price. At $12,000 for a two-CPU license, its market penetration is likely to remain limited. Flex's demonstration of the Web's potential, however, is absolutely Jolting.
—Chris Minnick
Productivity
Award Winners |
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Contribute 3.0 Anyone who's built a website knows that initial construction is only the beginning; a never-ending stream of changes to the content, as well as occasional changes to the architecture or design, are de rigueur. Every developer eventually looks for ways to offload content changes to the site owner, and the lucky ones find Macromedia's Contribute.
Macromedia has used the strengths of Dreamweaver's underlying engine to create, in Contribute, a tool that allows developers to put site owners in charge of their sites' content. Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents can be embedded into Contribute's pages. User-specific roles can be assigned to prevent problems, and basic site-building capabilities are included, allowing greater control over their sites. Contribute lets developers and users alike focus on what they each do best.
—Warren Keuffel |
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NitroX 2.0 Is it a fertilizer? Rocket fuel? A gas mixture for survival respiration in far climes? For developers using JSP, Java and Struts in Eclipse, NitroX from Cupertino, Calif.–based M7 is all of the above—and then some.
I especially liked NitroX's thorough integration with Struts and the tool's holistic approach of changing a site rather than just manipulating code files. For example, setting and then triggering a breakpoint in a JSP page lets you drill stepwise down to your custom tags' affected Java code. Any changes you make to upward- and downward-affected code layers are quickly found and accomplished.
Code completion irrespective of language layer, assistance in choosing the right Struts resource for any given context, immediate detection of misnamed resources and multiplatform operation round out this strong time- and effort-saving tool.
—Roland Racko |
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Apache Tomcat 5.0 Tomcat is a no-brainer for me—it's the industry's most popular Java Servlet and Java Server Pages (JSP) Web container, and has become the official reference implementation and standard for developing and deploying J2EE Web applications and Web services.
Its improved performance over Tomcat 4.1 comes from extensive tuning of its request pipeline, which significantly reduces memory pressure on the JVM's garbage collector, tag pooling and plug-ins, and a build system based on Ant 1.6. Tomcat is interoperable with most operating systems that are capable of running a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), including Windows, Unix, Linux and others. Tomcat's also interoperable with any JDBC-compliant database, including Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and others.
What does all this mean? It's now easier than ever to build and deploy apps on Tomcat.
—John Lam |
Software Development
WEBSITES AND DEVELOPER NETWORKS
Glenn Bisignani, Product Marketing Manager
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The O'Reilly Network
O'Reilly
I don't know a single developer who doesn't have a shelf full of reference and tutorial books boasting the ubiquitous animal-adorned covers of Sebastopol, Calif.–based O'Reilly & Associates. When it comes to authoritative, timely and concise advice that prevents developers from pulling out whatever hair they may have left, publisher Tim O'Reilly reigns supreme.
The O'Reilly Network rises to the next level by providing a free online resource where many of the authors responsible for O'Reilly's books contribute, blog and otherwise provide additional content in support of the developer community.
Whether you're just browsing or seeking answers to specific questions, you'll find the answers somewhere in O'Reilly's vast Network. I've found free explanations to my Java programming questions, insights into the future of the Semantic Web, free support in customizing Apple's OS X features, free tips on how to make Microsoft products do my bidding, and priceless inspiration in Tim O'Reilly's relentless support for sensible intellectual property legislation in support of open source software.
The O'Reilly Network is the latest manifestation of O'Reilly's ongoing lesson to all of us about how to provide superb service to an industry while having fun, making a profit, and supporting open source software.
Did I mention it's free?
—Warren Keuffel
Productivity
Award Winners |
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developer.*
Like many of today's best websites, developer.* (DeveloperDotStar.com) began humbly, as a place for its prolific founder, Daniel Read, to post his thoughts on software development. In 2003, the site was expanded into a Web magazine format that features new content daily. But unlike many other sites with content posted on a daily basis, developer.* has managed to retain high quality in both its articles as well as in its community discussions—following each article is a link to some of the most well-reasoned comments on the Web.
A random sampling of recent features includes an interview with a developer in Colombia, book reviews, reprints of classic software development essays and an article about implementing Gang of Four factory patterns with Java 5 generics. Developer.* demonstrates once again the power of good content combined with usable design and a community environment.
—Chris Minnick |
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developerWorks DeveloperWorks has been one of my favorite technical sites for years. Big Blue understands the needs of developers very well—not only does it offer information regarding its products and services, it posts great "how-to" technical articles on a vast array of topics, including how to write better Java, how to be effective with UML 2, how to create better data models, and how to administer Linux successfully. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
More important, in my opinion, are the discussion forums, which feature a similarly wide range of discussion topics. I'm a regular participant on several modeling and process-related groups, and have been impressed with many of the discussions posted. Even if you don't work in an IBM shop, you'll find developerWorks a valuable resource.
—Scott Ambler |
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Java.net One of the Java platform's key strengths is its vibrant developer and user community. From the Java open source community (Apache, Eclipse and JBoss) to the Java Community Process (JCP), the community itself drives the innovation around the Java platform. The official website to nurture the Java community, Java.net fuses many useful features, including weekly technical articles, discussion forums, wikis, blogs and community news. The featured articles and news contents are edited and managed by veteran editors in the Java field, and the blogs are written by noted developers and authors in the community. Hence, content quality is very high compared to many other community sites. Java.net also provides free hosting services to open source Java projects and local Java users' groups.
—Michael Yuan |
Software Development
HALL OF FAME
 Bob Corrigan, Product Manager Software Technologies Group
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InstallShield
Macrovision
In the words of longtime Jolt judge Roland Racko, "It's all too easy for a development team, after expending exorbitant brainpower on the look and feel of a product, to forget that the first 10 seconds of the user's experience has nothing to do with the product itself—rather, it's the installation procedure that provides the crucial introductory experience." ("The First Ten Seconds," Sept. 2003). You know well the details installers must contend with: multiple platforms, different JVMs on each desktop, distribution methods ranging from DVD to download, optional language or help files, and regression testing of the installation process for all the platforms. To further paraphrase Racko, one product has the power and API extensibility to build an installer for anything from a toaster to the Starship Enterprise. That is Installshield, from Santa Clara, Calif.–based Macrovision. This classic Windows installer has now become a cross platform performer par excellence.
As with many Jolt Hall of Famers, InstallShield has made its mark and helped define an entire tool genre now populated by flourishingly competitive players. It came onto the developer scene in 1987, and its longevity and success in standardizing the software installation process—thus establishing a new niche of software tools—warrant induction into the Jolt Hall of Fame.
—Alexandra Weber Morales
| The Jolt Hall of Fame Software Development has inducted nine outstanding companies and products into the Jolt Hall of Fame since 1996.
2004 Installshield by Macrovision |
Software Development
BOOKS: TECHNICAL
 Glenn Bisignani, Product Marketing Manager |
Better, Faster, Lighter Java
Bruce A. Tate and Justin Gehtland
(O'Reilly, 2004)
Right from Chapter 1, Bruce A. Tate and Justin Gehtland come out swinging a pair of matched Louisville Sluggers at iconic fixtures of the Java development world: "Development is getting so cumbersome and complex that it's threatening to collapse under its own weight. Typical applications use too many design patterns, too much XML and too many Enterprise JavaBeans. And too many beans lead to what I'll call the bloat." Whack!
Battered J2EE developers will probably cheer the book's frequent slams at the architecture—and don't even get them started on container-managed persistence. But Better, Faster, Lighter Java doesn't just complain; it offers alternatives. For example, instead of J2EE's persistence mechanisms, the authors recommend giving Hibernate a try, though they're careful to point out that framework's limitations.
Five principles drive the meat of the book: Keep It Simple; Do One Thing and Do It Well; Strive for Transparency; Allow for Extension; You Are What You Eat. The authors develop these via programming examples and also explore them in the context of the existing Hibernate and Spring frameworks.
Finally, they offer some recommendations for the Java development community's future and the challenges it faces.
If you're a Java developer with an uneasy feeling about where the language and its libraries are going, you need to read this book.
—Rick Wayne
Productivity
Award Winners |
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C++ Coding Standards You know what they say about judging a book by its cover—don't do it. This extremely readable tome is packed with useful information far beyond mere coding standards. In fact, this book even provides some valuable nuggets for Java programmers, too.
Organized into 12 groups ranging from organizing code to proper use of exceptions and the Standard Template Library, the book offers a handful of practices and guidelines for each group.
If you want to write good C++ programs—not just better C code—you need to understand the object-oriented capabilities of C++ and how to write programs that are correct, efficient and maintainable. The authors have crafted one of the best books available to help you meet these goals.
—Gary Pollice |
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Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook You're a Java developer, and your boss comes to you with an assignment that involves integrating with a relational database. You don't know how to map objects to a relational database, but there's a lightweight service that does just this for Java called Hibernate. James Elliott's Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook leads the way.
The combination of O'Reilly's brilliant Developer's Notebook series design and layout with Elliott's deep, useful knowledge of Hibernate is a winning one. Whether you want Hibernate to talk to multiple databases at the same time or use the Hibernate Query Language to see your mapped tables in OO form, Elliott explains everything in a simple, clear, concise fashion.
—Johanna Rothman |
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Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse Eclipse is much more than an IDE. It's a platform that allows developers to build their own tools or even Rich Client applications; in fact, some of its most powerful features are available as third-party plug-ins. For Eclipse users, the book employs the IDE user interface to introduce key productivity features such as refactoring and team collaboration. For Eclipse tools and Rich Client application developers, the book covers details of the SWT UI package, resource management, lifecycle management, and the interaction between plug-ins and built-in IDE features. Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse is an authoritative guide that covers almost everything you need to know about the Eclipse platform.
—Michael Yuan |
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