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• Highlights Through the Years: A Jolt Timeline

"I have seen in your eyes a fire of determination to get this war job done quickly. My confidence in you is total, our cause is just. Now you must be the thunder and lightning of Desert Storm."

–General H. Norman ("Stormin' Norman") Schwarzkopf's address to the coalition troops prior to the start of the ground war.

The sights and sounds of the Gulf War were in the eyes and ears of the Jolt judges 10 years ago when the deliberations for the first Jolt Awards were being held: Batwing F-117A stealth bombers targeted Iraqi buildings and bunkers with precision-guided bombs, while orange tracers from scattershot ack-ack anti-aircraft guns lit the night sky over downtown Baghdad; the fiery glow of state-of-the-art Tomahawk cruise missiles trailed across the sky toward the dark horizon while sirens screamed. Watching the televised war in the Persian Gulf was like watching a Nintendo game, a "robo war" conducted with some of the world's most advanced weaponry in which coalition attacks were intense, unremitting and deadly. The overwhelming impression of this most graphic display of American technological prowess was that high-tech warfare had, indeed, come of age.

In many ways, though, we were still in the deep dark ages technologically, as shown by the products garnering Jolt Awards in the early 1990s. Microsoft's Windows 3.0 and Visual Basic 1.0 were just coming on the scene. The qualitative leap in software development productivity that came with the rise of the object-oriented paradigm was just starting to have an impact in tools like Borland's Turbo C++ Professional 1.0 (a 1990 Jolt recipient) and 1992 winner Rational Rose for Windows 1.0. Developers soon realized, too, that object-oriented programming (OOP) involved more than adding features to existing programming languages. It involved a new way of thinking, and the first two editions of Grady Booch's Object-Oriented Design with Applications were recognized in 1991 and 1993 for promoting basic OOP principles, in addition to providing useful case studies written Smalltalk, Object Pascal, C++, CLOS and Ada.

The broad spectrum of computer languages recognized by 1992 Jolts Awards (Borland's Pascal with Objects, Lucid's Energize C++ environment, Visual Basic 2.0) and Productivity Awards (Watcom C/386, KPWin++, PDC Prolog, and Smalltalk/V) narrowed considerably when the twin Microsoft juggernauts of Visual Basic and Visual C++ gained the upper hand in the market in 1993, 1994 and 1995. But the mid-decade market consolidation around Microsoft tools loosened with the emergence of the World Wide Web. By 1996, Java had exploded on the scene, and for the past few years the judges have tracked the rapid maturation of the language on the Jolt radarscope with awards for Java's JDK 1.1 and Java 2 (aka JDK 1.2)

Awards this year for Inprise's JBuilder, IBM's VisualAge for Java, Sun's Jini Java toolkit, Parasoft's Jtest and KL Group's JClass shows that the momentum behind Java hasn't slackened. The rise of Java was one of many shifts in the tools market recorded by Software Development’s unbiased, iconoclastic and industry-recognized awards program–one of the few to consistently support quality tools, regardless of vendor size and marketing strength. Indeed, as John Charles noted in an article about the Jolt Awards in the July/Aug. 1999 issue of IEEE Software:

"One area in the software industry that has witnessed more than its share of radical shifts is the tools market. An illuminating record of these changes has been Software Development magazine’s Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards. A survey of these awards, which have identified best-of-breed tools in commercial software development since 1991, offers a lens through which we can trace some of the decade’s most interesting trends."

Most of the important new development paradigms that surfaced in the 1990s (the Unified Modeling Language, open-source software, the Web and Java) have all been recognized with Jolt or Productivity Awards. The 1998 Jolt award given to Software Development columnist Clemens Szyperski for his book Component Software–Beyond Object-Oriented Programming and this year's award to the Rational Enterprise Suite (a set of tools integrated across the software lifecycle) suggest that the underlying concepts of the object-oriented approach have matured over the past decade, and attention has gradually shifted from issues of coding, to issues of design, to issues of analysis. Whatever new paradigm follows (or evolves out of) current development practices, it's likely the constantly changing panel of returning and new Jolt judges will continue their stellar job in the coming years of recognizing the tools and techniques that spark the industry with their significance. The decade that began with a war ended with peace, prosperity, and unbridled productivity on the part of the software development community. And for that we can all be thankful.

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