Features: May 1998: 1997 Jolt & Productivity Awards
The U.S. Department of Justices (DOJ) investigation into Microsofts monopoly position was arguably the most important software development industry issue last year. Its an issue that Software Development readers came back to again and again in their feedback to articles and reviews.
It was also an issue for our Jolt Award judges, as they evaluated development tools for our Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards. Despite the deadly seriousness of the issue as far as business competitiveness and free market viability, our Jolt judges were able to maintain some perspective, and humor, as the following pearly gates story, which surfaced during the judges deliberations, reveals.
Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Al Gore are in an airplane crash. They go to heaven, and there, just inside the pearly gates, is God sitting on His throne. God asks Vice President Gore, Al, what do you believe?
Al promptly answers, I believe the internal combustion engine is evil and responsible for most of the problems on Earth. What we need to do is save the world from CFCs.
God thinks for a second and says O.K., that sounds good to me. Come and sit at my left hand.
God then addresses President Clinton. Bill, what do you believe?
Clinton replies, Well, I believe in empowering the people. I think people should be responsible for their own choices and that if we all felt and shared each others pain, we would go a long way toward reducing class and race hatred.
God thinks for a second and says O.K., that sounds good. Come and sit at my right hand.
God then addresses Bill Gates. Bill, what do you believe?
Gates says, I believe youre sitting in my chair.
While Microsoft tried to deflect criticism by questioning the DOJs right to orchestrate the chorus of arguments related to its monopoly position, there seemed to be some consensus at year-end that, because of its position, Microsoft, like Caesars wife, needed to be held to a higher standard of virtuea lesson that high government officials were also in the process of learning. As this debate raged, our Jolt Awards went on.
What Is a Jolt?
Software Development magazines Jolt Product Excellence Award, bestowed each year at the Software Development Conference and Expo, honors development tools that, in some way, made the difficult task of developing corporate software easier, faster, more efficient, or more precise. These are the products that jolted the industry with their significance, and brought a jolt of productivity to software development managers and their teams. This is the logic underlying the awards design: a can of hyper-caffeinated Jolt Cola embedded in a block of Lucite.
For the past eight years, weve honored great development tools with this highly coveted awardwhich in the corporate development industry outclasses both the Oscar and the Golden Globe. Or maybe even higher: When Grady Booch accepted the Jolt Award in the Design and Management Tools category for the UML 1.0+ Specification, he compared it to the Nobel Peace Prize in the software industry, stating A large number of people had to work together and come to an agreement on the need for a Unified Modeling Language.
The Categories
In 1997, vendors, judges, and readers nominated a record 269 products for Joltsonce again, almost twice the number from the previous year. From this group, the judges selected 40 finalists and evaluated these products to select the winners.
Software Development honors products in six categories: languages and development environments; utilities; books and computer-based training; design and management tools; libraries, frameworks, and components; and special (for products that defy the preceding categories). One product in each category receives the Jolt Product Excellence Award, while the three runners-up receive the Productivity Award. On the following pages, youll see a mixture of books and products that either signify an important new development paradigm (the UML and Java JDK 1.1) or represent tried-and-true enhancements in the brave new world of n-tier web development.
The Judges
The Jolt and Productivity Awards wouldnt take place without our esteemed panel of judges, drawn from the writers and editors of Software Development magazine:
Scott Ambler
Andy Barnhart
Andrew Binstock
Dana Cline
Barbara Hanscome
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Warren Keuffel
Bill Lazar
Larry OBrien
Roland Racko
Dan Rogers
Guy Scharf
Roger Smith
Jacques Surveyer
Karl Wiegers
Alan Zeichick
The Hall of Fame Debate
Only products that have consistently shown serious content improvement release after release make it into the short list for our Jolt Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame award is reserved for products that have received so many Jolts in the past that we feel special recognition is due. This year, the judges debated long and furiously, but they finally reached consensus that the Hall of Fame Award should go to Microsofts Visual Basic. Visual Basic represents a serious productivity aid within the software engineering culture, and has won so many previous awards that we couldnt ignore it.
You can read more about the Visual Basic debate and all the Jolt and Productivity Award winners on the following pages. Then, you can decide for yourself which side of the fence you want to be onor if the gate is still open in the DOJs efforts to corral Microsoft.
Langauges and Development Environments
Productivity Awards
Jolt Award
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Utilities
Productivity Awards
Jolt Award
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Books and Computer-Based Training
Productivity Awards
Jolt Award
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Design and Management Tools
Productivity Awards
Jolt Award
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Libraries, Frameworks, and Components
Productivity Awards
Jolt Award
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Special
Productivity Awards
Jolt Award
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Hall of Fame
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