And the Winners Are...

The Jolts! The best products! The lights! The glamor! The music was catchy, the patter snappy, the jokes ... well, hey, the best products!

Software Development Editor in Chief Alexandra Weber Morales and Technical Editor Rosalyn Lum presided over the 13th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards Wednesday night at SD West, honoring the best of the best in our industry. Many were called, but few were chosen: Out of hundreds of nominations in 11 categories, the Jolt judging team selected six finalists per category, of which only one took home the prized Electric Blue Jolt bottle.

Actually, one finalist did even better than that: During the process, the judges concurred that Microsoft Developer Network's long history of unrivalled excellence put it over the top, and promoted it into the Jolt Hall of Fame. One paid it the ultimate five-star accolade: “You gotta have this.”

And the winners are ...

Books, Practical/General Developer Interest
Jolt Award: Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Processes, Robert C. Martin
Productivity Awards: Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond by Paul Clements, Felix Bachmann, Len Bass, David Garlan, James Ivers, Reed Little, Robert Nord and Judith Stafford; Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler; and Test-Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck.

Books, Technical
Jolt Award: Thinking in Java (3rd edition) by Bruce Eckel
Productivity Awards: Core Java 2, Vol. 1: Fundamentals (6th edition) by Cay Horstmann and Gary Cornell; PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson; and Understanding Web Services by Eric Newcomer.

Business Integration and Data Tools
Jolt Award: Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect (Microsoft)
Productivity Awards: WebSphere Studio (IBM); ColdFusion MX (Macromedia); SQL Anywhere Studio (Sybase)

Design and Analysis Tools
Jolt Award: Together WebSphere Studio Edition (Borland)
Productivity Awards: ArgoUML; Codagen Architect 3.0 (Codagen); SmartDraw (SmartDraw.com)

Languages and Development Environments
Jolt Award: Borland JBuilder 8 Performance Bundle (Borland)
Productivity Awards: Groove Toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET (Groove Networks); IntelliJ IDEA 3.0 (JetBrains); XML Spy 5 Enterprise Edition (Altova)

Libraries, Frameworks, and Components
Jolt Award: .NET Compact Framework 1.0 (Microsoft)
Productivity Awards: CLX (Borland); ComponentOne Studio Enterprise (ComponentOne); JClass (Quest Software)

Project Management Tools
Jolt Award: Test Track Pro (Seapine Software)
Productivity Awards: Integrity Manager with Source Integrity, Enterprise Edition (MKS); Perforce (Perforce Software); Select Process Director (Select Business Solutions)

Testing Tools
Jolt Award: OptimizeIt Suite 5.0 (Borland)
Productivity Awards: JProbe (Quest Software); SilkTest (Segue Software); WebQA (Watchfire)

Utilities
Jolt Award: InstallAnywhere Enterprise Edition (Zero G Software)
Productivity Awards: Anthill (Urbancode); DevPartner Studio Professional Edition (Compuware); RoboHelp X3 (eHelp)

Web Services Tools
Jolt Award: WebLogic Workshop (BEA Systems)
Productivity Awards: M7 Application Assembly Platform (M7); SOAPScope 1.0 (Mindreef); SOAPTest (Parasoft)

Websites and Developer Networks
Jolt Award: alphaWorks (IBM)
Productivity Awards: dev2dev Online (BEA); JavaRanch (javaranch.com); QAForums.com (Betasoft Inc.)