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Readers' choice awards are always popular—after all, who doesn't want to know what products or companies are held in high regard down in the trenches of the everyday, workaday world of IT? Alas, the same contests can also be high-stakes affairs—at least to the companies vying for the awards. In the pursuit of recognition and positive publicity, companies work hard to get their employees and customers to vote for them, sometimes skewing the contest results. However, the winners of Software Development's Readers' Choice Awards aren't victims of the same fate: To more accurately represent our readership's choices, voting was by invitation only and tracked by a unique code, limiting each reader to one vote and one vote only. The results truly reflect our readers' favorites—these are the companies and products you use and admire.

Reader's Choice Award recipients: Front Row L-R: Dmitry Skavish, senior software developer, Jet Brains; Paula Hunter, business development director, Open Source Development Labs (OSDL)(for Linux); Jeff Miller, senior software engineer, developerWorks, IBM Software Group; John Graham, staff software engineer, Sybase Back Row L-R: Jim Barillo, senior manager, Borland; Parag Patel, senior director, VMware; Thom Robbins, developer evangelist, Microsoft; Yoav Shapira, system design and management fellow, MIT (for the Apache Foundation)

In May 2005, the call for nominations went out, reaching our readers through newsletters, in print and on our website. Nominations totaled 189 throughout eight categories, with 1,126 votes cast once data was cleaned and tabulated. Vote tabulation and survey design was conducted by Wilson Research in San Carlos, Calif.

Unlike Software Development's juried Jolt Awards, which employ more product-specific categories, the Readers' Choice Awards seeks to more closely represent our readers' concerns. This year we've introduced three new categories: Best Employer, Best GUI and Best Scripting Language. The remaining categories are Best Open Source Tool, Best Technical Support, Most Innovative Tool, Most Robust Tool and Most Tried and True Tool.

While last year's winners were all Fortune 500 companies—thanks to their ubiquity in the marketplace—this year we've also included categories for small to medium-sized businesses (companies not in the Fortune 1000 list). This added another dimension to the awards, recognizing two great products or companies for most categories. However, in two categories—Most Robust Tool and Most Innovative Tool—our readers selected the same winner for the both the overall and the small to medium-sized business categories. In this situation, we recognized the one winner and merged the runner-ups into one list. Note that all runners-up are listed in alphabetical order.

The Winners for the Third Annual Readers' Choice Awards are:

Best Employer Overall
Winner: Google

"Great benefits, able to spend a portion of time for your own projects. Hard problems and great solutions.

—Chris Steinig
Senior Software Developer
Ruesch International

Runners-up:
Amazon.com
IBM
Sun Microsystems

Best Employer Small to Medium-Sized Business
Winner: McAfee

"In the past three years, some areas of McAfee have progressed from the dark ages of development to modern agile methodologies. These advancements have enabled the entire McAfee company to focus on the user experience.

—Don Hanson
Development Lead
McAfee Inc.

Runners-up:
MKS
SAS
Sybase

Best GUI Overall
Winner: Visual Studio (Microsoft)
"Extremely powerful and full-featured, yet easy to use.

—Dennis Hughes
Technical Lead
CyberTrader Inc.

Runners-up:
Delphi (Borland)
Eclipse Platform (Eclipse Foundation)
Mac OS X Tiger (Apple)

Best GUI Small to Medium-Sized Business
Winner: Delphi (Borland)

"I've been developing software for more than 10 years, and so far, no tool has exceeded the power of Delphi since Delphi 1.0. The many highlighted features of VS.NET and Eclipse have been long part of Delphi. The strength of Delphi lies not only in the good interface but in the power of the language.

—Rico Pamplona
Senior Software Engineer
AVSOFT-TSS

Runners-up:
Eclipse Platform (Eclipse Foundation)
IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains)
Qt (Trolltech)

Best Open Source Tool
Winner: Eclipse (Eclipse Foundation)

"Excellent IDE framework. Allows plug-ins, so companies that could not afford to create their own IDE can, with relative ease, create a plug-in and have a full-featured IDE.

—Karstyn McCoy
IT Director, Horizon Instructional Systems
A California Public Charter School

Runners-up:
GCC (Free Software Foundation)
Perl (Larry Wall)
Tomcat (Apache Software Foundation)

Best Scripting Language
Winner: Perl (Larry Wall)

"It's broad and deep, running on many operating systems. It's free, and there are many high quality Perl modules available from CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network).

—Mark Senn
Systems Programmer
Purdue University

Runners-up:
Python (Guido van Rossum)
PHP (PHP)
Ruby (Yukihiro Matsumoto)

Best Technical Support
Winner: developerWorks (IBM)

"Nearly 5 million developers around the globe visit developerWorks each year for technical assistance with emerging open source technologies. While the site infrastructure is powered by open standards and IBM solutions, the site content is 'powered by' the developerWorks Web community.

—Kathy Mandelstein
Director, Worldwide Developer & Rational Marketing Programs
IBM SWG-ISV & Developer Relations, IBM Rational Software

Runners-up:
Apple (Apple)
IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains)
Oracle Database (Oracle)

Best Technical Support Small to Medium-Sized Business
Winner: IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains)

"There's no question that remains unanswered. Professional assistance is delivered immediately. Wide range of newsgroups, dedicated to different product aspects, allows users to communicate directly with IntelliJ IDEA developers.

—Ann Oreshnikova
Customer Support Manager
JetBrains

Runners-up:
Qt (Trolltech)
DevPartner Studio (Compuware)
SAS (SAS)

Most Innovative Tool
Winner: VMTN (VMware)

"If you want to set up an entire three-tier configuration for development and testing, virtually, on a single physical machine, VMTN will tell you how.

—Doug Baer, Systems Engineer, Desert Schools Federal Credit Union

Runners-up:
IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains)
MindManager (Mindjet)
Perforce (Perforce)
QuickBase (Intuit)

Most Robust Tool
Winner: Linux (Linus Torvalds)

"Linux powers a great number of Internet, embedded and consumer products, ranging from Web and mail servers to wristwatches. The reliability and stability of its code base is unsurpassed, as well, as its flexibility and provided services are second to none. It is used everywhere, even on the chip level, and it never let its users down.

—Vitaly Luban
Senior Software Engineer
Juniper Networks Inc.

Runners-up:
CodeWright (Borland)
OpenBSD.org
OS X (Apple)
Rational Application Developer (IBM)
VMware GSX Server (VMware)

Most Tried and True Tool
Winner: Visual Studio (Microsoft)

"What can I say? It's like the Energizer Bunny—it just keeps going.

Runners-up:
Apache Web Server (Apache Software Foundation)
Eclipse (Eclipse Foundation)
Linux (Linus Torvalds)

Most Tried and True Tool Small to Medium-Sized Business
Winner: Apache Web Server (Apache Software Foundation)

"It doesn't get any more tried and true than Apache's Web Server.

—Vernon Stinebake
Managing Director
IntelliProfit Software (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.

Runners-up:
Eclipse (Eclipse Foundation)
GNU Emacs (Free Software Foundation)
Linux (Linus Torvalds)

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