16th Annual Jolt Product Excellence & Productivity Awards Finalists

Developer Tools, Books, and Websites Vie for Coveted Trophy.

This should be of interest to software developers to keep themselves updated with some productive tools, best practices and methodologies.

"For the past 15 years, the Software Development Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards have been presented annually to showcase products that have “jolted” the industry with their significance and made the task of creating software faster, easier, and more efficient."

CMP Media’s Software Development Magazine Announces Finalists for the 16th Annual Jolt Product Excellence & Productivity Awards:

Books General

• Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville (O'Reilly)
• Best Software Writing by Joel Spolsky (Apress) *Should be a good exposure read
  
• Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel (Morgan Kaufmann)
• Prefactoring by Ken Pugh (O'Reilly)
• Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by Karl Fogel (O'Reilly)
• The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun (O'Reilly) *PM is a skill I must master
  
• The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Books: Technical

• Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas et al. (Pragmatic Bookshelf) *Agile and Ruby (Rail) sound intriguing to me
  
• Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams (Addison-Wesley) *A read if I plan to do some serious .NET development
  
• Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel (Apress)
• Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts Technology and Design by Thomas Erl (Prentice Hall)
• Why Programs Fail, First Edition: A Guide to Systematic Debugging by Andreas Zeller (Morgan Kaufmann) *Hopefully to be good guide on debugging
  
• Wicked Cool Java: Code Bits, Open-Source Libraries, and Project Ideas by Brian D. Eubanks (No Starch Press)

Enterprise Project Management

• Corticon Business Rules Management 4.0 (Corticon)
• JBoss 2 Portal (JBoss)
• ProVision Enterprise 5.0 (Proforma)
• Rally 5.6 (Rally Software Development)
• Visual Studio Team System 2005 (Microsoft) *Sounds like a comprehensive suite to me
  
• WelcomRisk 2.6 (Welcom)

Database Engines and Data Tools

• Attensity Discover 2.7 (Attensity)
• Berkeley DB 4.4 (Sleepycat Software)
• EnterpriseDB 2005 (EnterpriseDB)
• Google Maps API 2005 (Google)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (Microsoft) *Haven't drill into this yet. MS SQL 2000 satisfied my needs at the moment
  
• MySQL 5.0 (MySQL) *5 saves the day by supporting nested SQL
  

Defect Tracking, Change, and Configuration Management

• Automated Build Studio 1.7 (AutomatedQA)
• CollabNet Enterprise Edition 2005 (CollabNet)
• ElectricAccelerator 3.0 (Electric Cloud)
• FogBugz 4.0 (Fog Creek) *How good is this stuff?
  
• Guiffy SureMerge 7.0 (Guiffy Software)
• JIRA 3.4 (Atlassian Software)
• Perforce SCM 2005 (Perforce) *Looks complicated
  

Design Tools and Modeling

• Altova UModel 2005 (Altova)
• Borland Together 2006 for Eclipse (Borland)
• Compuware OptimalJ 4.0 (Compuware)
• Enterprise Architect 6.0 (Sparx Systems)
• Lattix LDM 2.0 (Lattix)
• MagicDraw UML 10.0 (No Magic)
• MindManager Pro 6.0 (Mindjet)

Development Environments

• Borland Developer Studio 2006 (Borland)
• CodeRush w/ Refactor! Pro 1.1 (Developer Express)
• Eclipse SDK 3.1 (Eclipse.org) *A very good free tool
  
• IntelliJ IDEA 5.0 (JetBrains)
• Komodo 3.5 (ActiveState)
• Visual Studio Team System 2005 (Microsoft) *Sounds like a comprehensive suite to me

Libraries, Frameworks, and Components

• .NET Framework 2.0 (Microsoft) *A worthy framework, hopefully for a better tommorrow
  
• Dundas Chart for .NET 5.0 (Dundas Software)
• Qt 4.0 (Trolltech)
• Spring Framework 1.2.6 (SpringFramework.org) *Superbly Cool!
  
• TopCoder Software Component Libraries 5.0 (TopCoder)
• U3 SDK 2005 (U3)

Mobile Development Tools

• Carbide.c++ Express (Nokia)
• Crossfire 5.6 (AppForge)
• Flash Lite 2.0 (Adobe)
• mWorks platform (mFoundry)
• NetBeans IDE 4.1 (Sun Microsystems) *Better GUI Designer than Eclipse
  
• Qtopia (Trolltech)

Quality Project Management

• CollabNet Enterprise Edition with Project Dashboard/Task Management 2005 (CollabNet)
• protexIP/development 3.0 (Black Duck)
• QACenter Enterprise Edition 5.1 (Compuware)
• Rally 5.6 (Rally Software Development)
• SilkCentral Test Manager 8.1 (Segue)
• TargetProcess Suite 1.4 (TargetProcess)

Security Tools

• CodeAssure 2.0 (Secure Software)
• DevInspect & SecureObjects 1.5 (SPI Dynamics)
• DevPartner SecurityChecker 1.0 (Compuware)
• Elemental Compliance System 1.4 (Elemental)
• Fortify Security Tester 1.0 (Fortify)
• SQL Backup Pro Edition 2005 (Red Gate Software)

Testing Tools

• Agitator 3.0 (Agitar Software)
• AQtime 4.7 (AutomatedQA)
• Clover 1.3 (Cenqua)
• Parasoft Jtest 7.0 (Parasoft)
• TestComplete 4.0 (AutomatedQA)
• VMTN Subscription 2005 (VMware)

Utilities

• Camtasia Studio 3.0 (TechSmith)
• DevPartner Studio 8 (Compuware)
• dotTrace 1.1 (JetBrains)
• Fog Creek Copilot 1.2 (Fog Creek Software) *How good is this stuff?
  
• Openmake 6.4 (Catalyst Systems)
• ReSharper 1.5 (JetBrains)
• SnagIt 7.2 (TechSmith) *A Fine Tool
  

Web Development Tools

• Backbase Standard Edition 3.1 (Backbase)
• ColdFusion MX7 (Adobe) *Heard of it, never bother to try it
  
• DevPartner Studio 8 (Compuware)
• JBoss Application Server 4x (JBoss) *Haven't really need an App Server yet, Tomcat will suffice at the moment
  
• Macromedia Studio 8 2005 (Adobe) *Some Goodies
  
• Rails 1.0 (rubyonrails.org) *I am tempted to try the rail
  
• Zend Studio - Enterprise Edition 5.0 (Zend) *Pretty good (probably the best PHP IDE around), but Eclipse and VS Studio are much better IDEs