You can be the greatest coder in the world and be able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound but your effort and time may be wasted if you are not working with the best tools available. Herein lies the rub, which tools are the best?
The readers of Developer.com have had their say. After a month of nominations and a month of voting we have finally counted the votes and have our winners.
This year we added the Framework, JSR (Java Specification Request), and Security Tool of the Year categories and removed the Enterprise Tool of the Year category thinking that those products are adequately represented throughout the categories. The results of this year's contest were cut and dry, probably the cleanest outcome we have had since the contest was initiated. The finalists were chosen with overwhelming majorities, as were the winners. Because of how the voting turned out we decided to name two winners in the .NET Tool or Add-in of the Year category (the second being a Non-Microsoft produced product), a tie in the Open Source Tool of the Year category and a runner up for the Wireless/Mobile Development Tool or Add-in of the Year.
Again this year, Sun turned out to be the company taking home the most wins. Sun repeated their honors by taking home five of this year's awards. Java related products overall turned out to be a big winner.
Brad Jones, Executive Editor of Developer.com and EarthWeb.com's Software Development Channel comments "It continues to be interesting times for developers. The battles between java and .NET continue to be fierce although not completely dominant as other technologies are sneaking into the mix as well. Even so, it was not surprising to see a tool that is evolving to support both platforms take top honors in the Development tool of the year – that product being Eclipse."
And the Winners Are...
Technology of the Year:
AJAX From Mozilla Developer Center
Framework of the Year:
JavaServer Faces From Sun Microsystems Inc.
Development Tool of the Year:
Eclipse From the Eclipse Foundation
Development Utility of the Year:
Ant From The Apache Software Foundation
Web Service Product of the Year:
Google APIs From Google Inc.
Wireless/Mobile Development Tool or Add-in of the Year:
J2ME™ Wireless Toolkit From Sun Microsystems Inc.
(Runner up)
Sybase® PocketBuilder 2.0 From Sybase Inc.
Database Tool or Add-in of the Year:
MySQL 5.0 From MySQL AB
Java Tool/Add-in of the Year:
Sun Java™ Studio Creator By Sun Microsystems Inc.
JSR (Java Specification Request) of the Year:
JSR 244: Java EE 5.0
.NET Tool or Add-in of the Year:
Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 From Microsoft Corporation
(The Winning Non-Microsoft product:)
Mono .NET Framework From mono-project.com
Security Tool or Add-in of the Year:
Sun Java System Identity Manager From Sun Microsystems Inc.
Open Source Tool of the Year (Tie):
OpenOffice 2.0 From OpenOffice.org and
Firefox From Mozilla Foundation
This years finalists for Technology of the year indicate the changes towards
standards and the ability to be untied from a specific vendor or machine.
While the importance of AJAX has been increasing, it was surprising to see
how much AJAX dominated the voting in the Technology category.
Last year, MySQL AB's MySQL database took top honors in the database
category. With the release of SQL Server 2005 this year, we expected that a
new winner could be crowned. MySQL, however, managed to hold onto the votes
and retain the top spot in the Database Tool or Add-in of the Year.
Unlike my Executive Editor, the Open Source category surprised me a bit. I expected a programming tool to win, not a writing tool. OpenOffice.org has shown that it has a very strong product and is considered very popular in the Open Source community considering it, as a non-programming tool was named one of the winners in the Open Source Tool of the Year category. The Firefox win did not surprise me as much because of the close tie between programming and an Internet browser.
Over the next week we will be posting articles that detail each of the categories. Each will give more insight into the finalists including the qualities we believe helped them to be recognized by the readers of Developer.com. Each of these articles focuses on a different award and includes insight on the winning product and information on the trends in the market that can be derived based on the voting.
Congratulations to all the people who produced the winning products. Thank you to all the readers who participated in the Development.com Product of the Year 2005 contest from the nominations through the voting.
For more details on each of the categories and its winners see the following articles:
Technology of the Year by Bradley L. Jones
Java Tool/Add-in of the Year By Dick Wall
Security Tool or Add-in of the Year By Steve Rowe
.NET Tool or Add-in of the Year By Mike Gunderloy
Wireless/Mobile Development Tool or Add-in of the Year By Alex Gusev
Development Utility of the Year By Dick Wall
Open Source Tool of the Year By David DeWolf
Framework of the Year By Vlad Kofman
Web Service Product of the Year By Jason Gilmore
Development Tool of the Year By Peter Nehrer
