The 13th Annual Software Development Jolt & Productivity Awards

Ever-evolving from their 1990 launch, the year's Jolts expand to include five new categories, juried and reader's choice tracks and — surprise — an electric blue bottle!


June 01, 2003
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/joltawards/the-13th-annual-software-development-jol/184414991

Every year, the judges—many of whom have been participating for over a decade—ask themselves which outstanding offerings among hundreds of nominated tools, books and websites have jolted the industry with a burst of inspiration. In its thirteenth iteration, the Software Development Jolt Awards honored newcomers and lesser-known tools, but didn’t forget some perennial favorites. The results reaffirm the power of agility in transforming development, make it clear that Web services are pushing past the corporate firewall, and portend a bright future for Java. Thankfully, innovation in the lifecycle tools market is alive and well.

The Jolt Methodology
This was my first time managing the Software Development Jolt Awards, a six-month marathon project. Not only was I new to the job, but this year, the editors made some major changes to the 13-year-old process.

First, we decided to distinguish the vendor-influenced portion of the competition from the reader-appreciation portion by splitting the Jolts into two tracks: a juried track in which all for-profit vendors paid to nominate their products, and a reader-nominated track meant to reflect the sentiments of working developers. While the juried track more or less followed the traditional process, the readers posed a challenge. Because of the panoply of products, categories and potential voters, the process had to be automated. I quickly made it a priority to find voting software to make my life easier.

The first tool I found was an open-source product—and though it could count votes and reports, I needed more sophistication for the final vote—like multiple ranking of products within categories, importing files rather than manually entering them, locking out judges who had not signed up for a particular category, and IP address checking. Though I evaluated several other open-source products, I found none to meet these needs, so I started looking at the paid product marketplace. Satisfied with an evaluation copy’s features, I selected Perseus. Their support was excellent, and soon, we had a full-featured voting website. Although our IT department didn’t support ODBC connection to the database, Survey Solutions created a .tsv file with which I could download and create a database and generate reports on my desktop—all within the product environment. I could also look at the raw data to see who was voting for what.

The juried voting went without a hitch, but the readers’ choice voting was a bit rockier. We had two automatic levels of security: To participate, voters had to be registered readers at SDmagazine.com—we posted the poll on our gated site (one vendor asked if I could remove the gate so that his users could vote for his product—sorry, no!). Voters were limited to one vote per item (with the help of cookies), and a manual third level of inspection: We looked for duplicate IP addresses to detect multiple votes if cookies were turned off. Some categories were well behaved, with no obvious fixing of votes detected—although suspected. But others were a tad more troublesome: flagrant excesses, with approximately 100 votes (which were promptly dumped) for one product, from the same IP address; and some clever manipulation (numerically stepping through the IP addresses)—those ended up in the circular file, as well. Next year, we’ll turn to user validation with e-mail and ID from magazine subscriber mailing labels, stash the process behind a double-gated site with encrypted password validation, require cookies and hide the whole contraption in some obscure directory … or something like that.

Bottom line? The Readers’ Choice Awards are posted on our website, but don’t set your clock by them. Next year, we hope for more participation and greater confidence and that the results more closely reflect our readers’ true choice.

—Rosalyn Lum

The Judging Panel

Thanks to the two dozen reviewers who felt both the thrill of brilliant software and the agony of buggy installs.

Scott Ambler
Andy Barnhart
Hugh Bawtree
Daniel Berlinger
Andrew Binstock
Dana Cline
Bob DelRossi
Gary Evans
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Warren Keuffel
Rosalyn Lum
Gary McGraw
Chris Minnick
A. Weber Morales
Larry O’Brien
Roland Racko
John Reitano
Johanna Rothman
Guy Scharf
Susan Spielman
Rick Wayne
Al Williams
Michael Yuan
Alan Zeichick


The Hall of Fame
Seven outstanding companies receive top honors.

2002 MSDN by Microsoft
2001 Borland
2000 Visual SlickEdit by MicroEdge
1999 O’Reilly and Associates
1998 Visio by Visio
1997 Visual Basic by Microsoft
1996 BoundsChecker by NuMega


UTILITIES

InstallAnywhere Enterprise Edition
Zero G Software


Trent Wheeler, Program Manager

Powerful and easy to use, InstallAnywhere 5.0 makes creating installers a pleasure. Zero G’s software creates installers for your application for almost any platform, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and a myriad of Unix platforms. Installers can be configured for distribution by CD or over the Web, or both. Even better, this flexibility is controlled with one install script.

InstallAnywhere is exceptionally easy to use. You create the install script using a graphical interface, adding the files and directories to be installed and specifying any special actions required. InstallAnywhere handles platform-specific details such as creating environment variables and shortcuts, and registering and installing platform-dependent libraries such as DLLs.

On Windows, InstallAnywhere reads and writes the registry as required; on Linux, RPM integration simplifies package management. For Java applications, LaunchAnywhere Java application launchers create a one-click executable file to start your application with the VM of your choice.

You can brand and customize the installation process with your own logo and installation steps with registration and licensing choices presented to the user during the graphical installation process. InstallAnywhere comes with pretranslated installer panels in 29 languages—a great benefit if you’re distributing your product internationally. Or you can create an installer that runs in console or silent mode—convenient for server-side deployment.

—Guy Scharf

DevPartner Studio Professional Edition
Compuware

Compuware continues the steady evolution of this long-time developer’s friend. DevPartner 7.0’s design enables you to track and trace the behavior of a failed transaction—such as a 500 error—from the browser to the server to the database and back to the browser across multiple processes. This edition also supports Visual Studio .NET, including C#, Visual Basic .NET and ASP .NET, as well as tight integration into the Visual Studio .NET IDE, adding to DevPartner’s already full capabilities of performance analysis, code coverage analysis, detection of incorrect API usage and detection of inefficient code. You say you’re not a pure .NET developer? No problem—DevPartner works its magic in mixed environments, too. 1997 Jolt Award winner.

—Roland Racko

RoboHelp X3
eHelp

If you think enough of your users to provide them with good online help—no matter what platform you’re programming to—RoboHelp X3 (Version .11) should be on your short list of tools, if not a list of one. It creates WinHelp, HTML Help, WebHelp, JavaHelp, Oracle Help and printed documentation—all from the same source files. That source, by the way, can be Microsoft Word documents, Framemaker, HTML, existing help files or help projects for other tools. For Windows help formats, precooked specialized templates are provided for common programs and tools like Excel, Visual C++ and Delphi; Microsoft Word is the native editor. If you’re doing Web applications, RoboHelp HTML is included, a stand-alone tool to create cross-platform, server-based HTML help—and to analyze usage patterns after you’ve deployed it.

—Rick Wayne

Anthill
Urbancode

Agile processes such as XP emphasize frequent builds and communication within the development group, along with early introduction of testing into the lifecycle. Organizations committed to version control systems such as CVS, SourceSafe, ClearCase, but lacking integration with build facilities, will find that Anthill 1.5 offers a way to get control of the build process, including recovery and reproduction of any previous build. An Anthill-controlled build can not only check out code and build it, but also run unit tests and calculate source code metrics. Team members can access build results, as well as ancillary documentation, at an Anthill-updated project website.

—Warren Keuffel

WEB SERVICES TOOLS

BEA WebLogic Workshop
BEA Systems


Leslie Tighe, Product Marketing Manager; Christina Guenier, Senior Manager, Public Relations

BEA WebLogic Workshop 7.0 is a slick package for those in a hurry to build Web services. Workshop makes it easy to build Web-enabled applications by freeing developers from Web-specific tasks, allowing them to concentrate on writing application logic in Java. The integration of an IDE, controls and a deployment environment enables some cool functionality that greatly enhances developer productivity.

The Workshop consists of two major components: a visual Java IDE and a runtime environment. The combination of these two elements allows for tight integration of development, testing and deployment tasks. The development environment enables the developer to visually connect Web services components, so you can write your Java code using standard Java interfaces and then connect it to an XML message component that translates the Java interface to a WSDL service. The Workshop uses code annotation to specify how the Java interfaces are translated to Web services. After specifying the Web services, controls and business logic, the workshop generates the necessary infrastructure code for the XML, SOAP and WSDL elements. Even better, it generates the J2EE runtime components required (EJBs, JMS queues and JDBC connections), the test stubs to feed test messages into the Web service and the test stubs to receive messages from the Web service.

—Hugh Bawtree

M7 Application Assembly Platform
M7

Developers using J2EE frequently encounter productivity problems related to difficulty with code reuse, integration with existing systems and performance problems. Many of these obstacles can be alleviated through the use of an application assembly platform, such as M7 2.0. M7 helps isolate developers from the complexity of integrating the underlying J2EE components by allowing you to build applications visually from J2EE components, store them in an object repository, and integrate them with major J2EE application servers such as BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and JBoss. M7 can also be used to build Java Server Pages and Web services.

—Warren Keuffel

SOAPscope
Mindreef

Frank Grossman and Jim Moskun, inventors of the classic NuMega BoundsChecker Windows API debugging tool, retired a few years ago. Big mistake—they soon got bored. Minds ablaze, they surfaced with SOAPscope 1.0, a unique SOAP transaction packet network sniffer that logs packet internals to an embedded relational database for debugging. Frank and Jim know that logging is only half the task; thus, SOAPscope turns hard-to-read packet data into pseudocode and XML representation from the database in real time. To improve tracing, database packets may be richly annotated with information such as the hyperlink that started the transaction. Further, incorrect packets may be re-sent to their target with debugging alterations. Another bonus: The tool is a great training environment for SOAP novices.

—Roland Racko

SOAPtest
Parasoft

Not one to miss a trend, Parasoft has taken its stellar testing-tool track record and extended further with SOAPtest 1.0. SOAP may be simple, but the messages it encodes are often anything but. SOAPtest’s components work together to simplify and reduce the Web service testing effort. Depending on whether it’s testing a server or a client, SOAPtest generates a client emulator or a server emulator.

For client emulators, Soaptest automatically generates test cases and values for each parameter in the XML message. The results are saved for regression testing; the saved test cases help determine the average and peak loads that the service can handle. SOAPtest also lets you develop and customize test cases with Java, Javascript or Python. This useful tool fits snugly into any Web service deployment effort.

—Hugh Bawtree

WEBSITES AND DEVELOPER NETWORKS

alphaWorks
IBM


Doug Tidwell, Senior Programmer and XML Evangelist

If you’re an early adopter, bookmark this site (www.ibm.com/alphaworks). IBM continues to tantalize the alpha-geek in all of us—this is where you can keep tabs on some of the exciting work going on at IBM R&D. Big Blue not only gives a peek at up-and-coming technologies, it also lets you get your feet wet by downloading and testing samples—thus contributing to the technologies’ evolution. More than 200 items are available, spanning areas such as Java, XML, Web services, wireless and collaboration, to name just a few. Each of these areas is then broken down into subcategories, so you can keep tabs on specific points of interest that might influence your development plans in the future.

Additionally, you’ll find newsletters and update lists to keep you abreast of pet projects, and more than 100 discussion forums on the various technologies. If you want to keep an eye on the future while you’re building for today, alphaWorks is the place to go.

—Sue Spielman

JavaRanch
www.JavaRanch.com

JavaRanch started out as a community website to help Java developers pass Sun’s Java certification exams. It has since evolved into a generic site featuring eight certification study groups and more than two dozen vibrant discussion groups that cover every aspect of Java technology, as well as major Java products. Compared with other developer communities, JavaRanch is especially friendly to beginners. Volunteer moderators (a.k.a. bartenders) often take the time to answer even the most basic questions.

In addition to the lively discussion forums, JavaRanch also features mock exams, an informational monthly newsletter, book reviews and weekly book giveaways. Most impressively, JavaRanch offers all these features with nary a corporate backer in sight. The volunteer moderators’ elbow grease, inspired by a strong sense of community, has helped JavaRanch maintain its vendor neutrality and friendly, educational atmosphere. Mosey on up sometime, pardner.

—Michael Yuan

BEA Dev2Dev Online
BEA Systems

BEA’s Dev2Dev Developer Network has been successful in rallying their 500,000-member developer community round BEA’s WebLogic platform. The results? A wealth of knowledge and resources available in this easy-to-navigate and useful site.

The free membership includes webinars, technical presentations, code libraries and samples, downloads and white papers, as well as discounts for training, magazine subscriptions and technical books. A plethora of user and news groups is available, as well as resource libraries including tools and utilities. If you’re a web developer working with WebLogic, it’s in your best interest to sign up for Dev2Dev.

—Sue Spielman

QAforums.com
BetaSoft

So your company just decided it was time to get serious about bugs and QA, and you’ve been appointed to wield the swatter. Where do you start? Surf over to www.qaforums.com, where you’ll find more than 50 moderated forums covering many of today’s important specialties in the testing and QA profession. The forums are much broader than simply application testing: You can choose from among tutorial sections for beginners, reviews and user experience with many of the popular testing tools and discussions of problems specific to various platforms, as well as security and usability topics. And, of course, you can post questions. Finally, the site is not just theory: Avail yourself of the downloads of ready-to-use testing scripts. Got a bug? Add some zip to your zapper at this site.

—Roland Racko

HALL OF FAME

MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network)
Microsoft


James Van Eaton, Program Manager for MSDN; John Oberon, Program Manager for MSDN Group; Seth Adams, Business Manager for MSDN Subscriptions

MSDN is the essential resource for developers using Microsoft tools, products and technologies.

Microsoft’s online resource support service dates back to early 1994, when websites were still rudimentary and Google-like searches were only a dream. The server name www.microsoft.com was already in use by a developer to test a networking stack, but was turned over to the product support group, ending up in Microsoft’s corporate data center. From its humble origins as just one of the microsoft.com fleet of websites, MSDN evolved into a Web development model with an unprecedented business plan, renowned designers and rigorous pre-launch specifications and testing. It soon soared from quarterly to monthly, weekly and finally daily updates to satisfy its hungry Internet audience.

MSDN has become an online candy store for developers, offering a full bounty of information from reference and technical articles to programs and code. Its universal subscription service, featuring fixed-price bundling of products and upgrades, sets an industry standard for sanity. As one of the judges noted, “Years ago, I reviewed MSDN, IBM and Sun’s developer programs. At that time, MSDN was the best. Since then, IBM has improved a lot, Sun has stayed about the same—but MSDN just keeps getting better.”

1995 Jolt Award winner; 2001, 1998 and 1994 Productivity Award winner.

—Rosalyn Lum



BOOKS: GENERAL INTEREST

Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Practices
Robert C. Martin
(Prentice Hall, 2002)


Robert C. Martin, author

Robert Martin is, in his own words, “happy as a clam,” and this infectious joy permeates Agile Software Development. Martin spent six years evolving the book from its initial charter as a second edition of Designing Object-Oriented C++ Applications Using the Booch Method(Prentice Hall, 1995) to its final incarnation as a bible of agile practices and design concepts. Bible is an apt description for the work, which incorporates 30 chapters and a multitude of appendices, case studies, patterns and even the Manifesto for Agile Software Development printed inside the cover. Martin’s engaging pedagogical style holds the reader’s attention, as does his mix of dialogue and code listings (an approach that will be familiar to followers of his Craftsman column for this magazine) with OO/agile practice and design discussions. The four appendices offer additional goodies: two UML notation examples, a satire of agile versus nightmare companies and “The Source Code Is the Design,” an essay by Jack Reeves. As effusive and unpredictable as Martin himself, this book stands out among the past year’s other agile titles as the one most clearly stamped with its author’s ebullient effectiveness.

—Alexandra Weber Morales

Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond
Paul Clements, Felix Bachmann, Len Bass, David Garlan, James Ivers, Reed Little, Robert Nord and Judith Stafford
(Addison-Wesley, 2002)

What good is a well-written software architectural document if you can’t communicate it effectively to different audiences? Documenting Software Architectures concisely articulates and illustrates ways to target a specific readership and manage the entire technical-writing process to encourage others to do what you need them to do. The book also offers powerful document design and development techniques for the reader to explore. Documenting a panoply of architectural views, communicating to the right audience and managing the whole process—all tucked in between two covers and ably compiled by the eight-member Carnegie Mellon SEI team. You’ll want to keep this book at hand.

—Rosalyn Lum

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
Martin Fowler
(Addison-Wesley, 2002)

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is a useful reference and a thought-provoking read, as well as a great introduction to enterprise application development design. Enterprise applications are systems with large amounts of persistent data that is accessed concurrently through many user interface screens.

Fowler describes 51 patterns in great clarity, many of which, depending on your enterprise application experience, are familiar. The book’s first hundred pages shine brightest: The author compares similar patterns and offers some well-reasoned advice to help the reader determine when to choose one pattern over another. The section ends with an interesting chapter on enterprise application architecture as a specific sequence of pattern choices, discussing the way that the choice of Java or .NET affects design.

—Hugh Bawtree

Test-Driven Development: By Example
Kent Beck
(Addison-Wesley, 2002)

In his latest contribution to the growing XP canon, Kent Beck homes in on one of its most confounding tenets: writing a test before coding a solution. In the book’s first example—building a currency conversion program in Java—Beck conversationally codes the program one test and one unit of functionality at a time. Then, to make things a bit more confusing, he creates an xUnit testing framework in Python, suggesting that dedicated XPers should roll their own language-specific testing frameworks. The testing patterns in Part III comprise an invaluable catalog: from basic testing behaviors (how to start, take a break, when to stop) to incremental ways to make tests work (faking it, triangulation) to technical patterns (mock objects, “Self Shunt,” “Log String,” “Crash Test Dummy”). Parts I and II may smack of self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness, but they lead effectively to the test patterns in Part III.

—Alexandra Weber Morales


BOOKS: TECHNICAL

Thinking in Java (3rd Edition)
Bruce Eckel (Prentice Hall, 2002)


Bruce Eckel, author

What is Java, exactly? For some, it’s just another programming language; for many others, it’s an application development and service delivery platform; for Bruce Eckel, it’s a philosophy. Java technology is one of the most complex and most successful software projects ever built. In Thinking in Java, Eckel (who also won a 1995 Jolt Award for his Thinking in C++) uses Java itself as the ultimate example to teach software architecture, object-oriented programming (OOP), best practices and design patterns. Now in its third edition, which covers JDK 1.4, Thinking in Java is a must-read for both novices and experts who want to delve deeper than the language and APIs.

Java is a premier language in the OOP world, so it’s fitting that the book’s first 10 chapters are dedicated to OOP concepts and implementation. The author explores difficult subjects such as interface-based reuse and polymorphism, then moves on to illustrate their usage in several core libraries: the Java collections library, the standard and new (1.4) Java I/O library, the concurrency library and the Swing GUI library. The book’s final two chapters focus on agile software development processes (can any author resist these days?) and Java-centric tools such as JUnit, ANT and Doclets.

This third edition of Thinking in Java continues to delight. And as the Java community adds new features and APIs to the core platform, we hope further editions will keep track with this evolution. 1998 Productivity Award winner (1st edition).

—Michael Yuan

Core Java 2, Vol. 1: Fundamentals (6th edition)
Cay Horstmann and Gary Cornell
(Prentice Hall PTR, 2002)

Starting from the language’s underlying tenets, developer tools and basic programming structures, Core Java 2 moves into two crucial areas: the OO programming concepts informing the entire Java class and interface structure, and the Java GUI programming model (Swing)and its design patterns. The authors use abundant code examples and sidebars to illustrate not only API usage, but also patterns and designs. Other important language features, such as the deployment model, error and exception handling, and standard I/O libraries, are also discussed. This edition also covers such J2SE 1.4 features as new I/O libraries, preferences, logging and regular expressions. For Java newbies, this book helps to establish correct programming habits and offers an unencumbered path to Java expertise.

—Michael Yuan

Understanding Web Services
Eric Newcomer
(Addison-Wesley, 2002)

“Today, software remains essentially a craft business, as automobiles were at the start of the twentieth century,” writes Eric Newcomer in the preface. “Having widely adopted standards has remained elusive despite many attempts: Web services may finally do the trick.” This book, from someone with firsthand knowledge of the W3C and industry efforts to establish universal XML-based protocols for distributed computing, is the single best introduction to the field that I’ve seen. Dispensing with lengthy explorations of XML minutiae, the author instead offers a clear explanation of the concept of Web services and the three XML applications (WSDL, SOAP and UDDI) that form its foundation. Furthermore, Newcomer’s book is firmly grounded in practicality and informed by his experience with CORBA and other standards.

—Chris Minnick

PHP and MySQL Web Development
Luke Welling and Laura Thomson
(Sams Publishing, 2002)

This volume is a great example of the kind of programming book most developers want and need: It offers practical, immediately usable, hands-on advice, with just enough theoretical, overarching material to prevent misapplication of the technology. Unlike many books that aim for this kind of result but lose their way in hundreds of pages of unimportant information, Welling and Thomson present two different technologies clearly, with a keen sense of their audience’s needs. In addition, they offer plenty of information about using the technologies together—material that clearly has been hard-won from their own experience. Developers will benefit from this practical, balanced exploration of the two technologies, and other authors can use this volume as a model for their own efforts.

—Andrew Binstock

BUSINESS INTEGRATION AND DATA TOOLS

Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect
Microsoft


Seth Adams, Business Manager for MSDN Subscriptions

While Visual Studio .NET as a whole snagged a Productivity Award in 2001, the 2002 Enterprise Architect edition was deemed Jolt-worthy by this year’s panel. The edition enhances the IDE that many judges feel is already the single best development environment today, providing full lifecycle support for enterprise development by leveraging Visio for UML design, project specification and database architecture. Round-trip capabilities enable developers to dynamically design, build and test prototypes in a remarkably short time frame. In addition, it comes with templates that provide best practices and specify development policy. Add to these extensive support for XML, Microsoft’s new .NET languages—as well as compatibility with traditional programming languages—and you have a tool that enables enterprise developers to be productive in more ways than any we’ve seen in a long time.

—Andrew Binstock

Macromedia ColdFusion MX
Macromedia

ColdFusion MX is an outstanding classic, totally rewritten in Java. The advantage? You can build your Web application in record time. This time around, Macromedia has enhanced ease-of-use by allowing complex procedural control flow in tags so developers can include logic in HTML pages without having to dip into Perl or Java. New components include full text search, charting, and remote Flash—but you can also write your own powerful objects, taking advantage of support for inheritance and state. ColdFusion will automatically generate the supporting WSDL for those components, underlining Macromedia’s commitment to making life simpler for the developer.

—Roland Racko

SQL Anywhere Studio
Sybase

SQL Anywhere Studio 8.0.2 is a comprehensive package that provides data management and enterprise-wide synchronization. What’s impressive about this product? It coordinates data from most of the devices we see in the enterprise: desktops, laptops, mobile and embedded; and supports most operating systems, including Windows, Unix, Novell and handheld platforms. Regardless of connection or application type, SQL Anywhere Studio ensures “always available” access to data and corporate applications. Offline operation is enabled through data synchronization and fully transactional local data management. Adaptive Server Anywhere is a small-footprint mobile and embedded DBMS optimized for use on workgroup servers, laptops and handheld devices, supporting both single-user and multi-user implementations. Support for OLE DB, ODBC, JDBC, Sybase OpenClient and Embedded SQL is available. 2000 Productivity Award winner.

—Sue Spielman

IBM WebSphere Studio
IBM

IBM WebSphere 5 has all the Web application tools and technologies you need in one customizable environment to develop a modern Web application, complete with tutorials and “cheat sheets.” The cheat sheets help navigate through the builders, editors and wizards required to build an application.

WebSphere tools can be divided into Java, Web and miscellaneous categories. The Java tools include a J2EE set that helps package J2EE and Web modules into Enterprise Application Archive (EAR) files. WebSphere also offers tools for EJB development, Java coding and Java profiling.

The Web tools work with HTML, CSS, JSP, servlets, Web services, XML schemas, DTDs and XSLT scripts. The miscellaneous category includes a Web server configuration tool and a database tool that creates and edits DB entities. 2000 Productivity Award winner.

—Hugh Bawtree

LANGUAGES AND DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS

JBuilder 8 Performance Bundle
Borland


Bill Pataky, Director of Product Management and Marketing

To my mind, Borland clearly “gets it”—they know that some people like to model, that many use test-driven development, and that a lot of us employ open source to build mission-critical systems. What can I say about JBuilder 8 Performance Bundle? It’s JBuilder, ’nuff said! JBuilder’s most impressive aspects include its UML modeling tool, its code refactoring features and its hooks into common open-source tools such as JUnit and Apache Struts. Although I like the modeling tool, I’m looking forward to its replacement by Borland’s newly acquired TogetherC, which I like even better.

JBuilder also does all the “normal” things that you’d expect, including support for J2EE, XML and Web services. It includes a wide array of development wizards that automate a lot of the grunt work such as the creation of JAR files, localization and UI building. The bottom line? Year after year, Borland has clawed its way to the top of the Java IDE market by building and then improving on a really great development tool. 2000 and 1999 Jolt Award winner; 2001, 1998 and 1997 Productivity Award winner.

—Scott W. Ambler

Groove Toolkit for Visual Studio .NET
Groove Networks

Raise your hand if you’ve collaborated via e-mail document ping-pong. Clench your fist if was awkward—not if three or more people were involved, of course, because your hand is still healing from repetitive desk-smacking.

Yes, there is a better way. It’s not immersive virtual reality à la Gibson or Stephenson, but it’s getting closer: It’s Groove Networks’ workspace/server technology, designed for building applications where people can work remotely, simultaneously and securely, sans fist-smacking.

Their Groove Toolkit is a VS .NET add-in that builds a stub Groove application and supporting files for you, then lets you access Groove’s API like any other .NET library, from C# or Visual Basic .NET. Groove provides the plumbing, while you build the GUI bits in VS .NET (Groove components can just be dragged into the project).

Your hand will thank you.

—Rick Wayne

IntelliJ IDEA
JetBrains

I admit it: I’ve never completely bought into the whole mouse-icon-menu scheme. Most of my development takes place in Emacs, and I drive compiles with make files. However, an IDE like JetBrains’ IDEA can lure me to the GUI development world.

The IDEA folks clearly understand real-world development. The IDE has a roster of impressive, useful features. Live templates let you quickly insert common code constructs; differences are tracked so you can see every change you’ve made; live syntax checking immediately highlights problems; you can select code and surround it with common constructs; and it has great integrated debugging.

IDEA’s best boast is its useful but unobtrusive nature—very few wizard dialogs gum up the works, and the computer doesn’t pause to show you some flashy feature while you’re trying to type. IDEA helps you without forcing its ideas (no pun intended) on your development. 2001 Jolt Award winner.

—Al Williams

XMLSPY 5 Enterprise Edition
Altova

Altova’s products have established themselves as the professional’s tools of choice for working with XML and affiliated technologies. Their tools are recognized for ease of use, reliability and comprehensive feature set. Despite—or perhaps because of—its leadership position, XMLSPY 5 (release 3) continues to be aggressively enhanced. This new version sports XSLT debugging; a WSDL edition; code generation in C, C# and Java; and a visual XSL:FO editor. This award commends Altova’s remarkable ability to add valuable features without detracting from the product’s ease of use. If Altova continues turning out such impressive updates, it can expect many more awards in the future.

2000 Productivity Award winner.

—Andrew Binstock

DESIGN AND ANALYSIS TOOLS

Together WebSphere Studio Edition
Borland (formerly TogetherSoft)


Bill Pataky, Director of Product Management and Marketing; David Intersimone, VP of Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist;
Arnaud Weber, Director of Research and Development

If you’re already working with IBM’s WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD), Borland’s Together WebSphere Studio Edition 6.0 should whet your appetite. The software extends the IBM WebSphere Studio (WSS) enterprise development environment by taking the model-build-deploy cycle and adding a plug-in to provide the modeling capability. Developers familiar with the WebSphere look and feel should have no problem picking up this product. Using model-driven development, Together WebSphere Studio integrates into WebSphere, pumping it up with drag-and-drop UML modeling, real-time code synchronization, existing and customized pattern support and automatic documentation generation, as well as audit data and metrics.

The real-time code synchronization allows for model changes to be reflected immediately in your code base—and vice versa. The audit and metric data lets you track your code quality during development. You can generate HTML reports to describe cohesion, complexity and coupling in the source code. The auto documentation features can be used to customize HTML-generated docs based on your current UML model information in the familiar JavaDoc format. Together WebSphere Studio requires an additional 55MB of space on the various platforms supported by WSAD.

— Sue Spielman

Argo/UML
http://argouml.tigris.org/

Developers looking for an open-source tool to develop systems in Java using UML will find that Argo/UML meets many, if not all, of their needs. A pure Java CASE tool, Argo/UML focuses on helping developers with cognitive aspects of design; support for code generation and reverse engineering is less mature. It also offers a full-featured state chart editor, including concurrency modeling. The project uses open XML file formats XMI and PGML; with the source code freely available, enterprising developers can modify Argo/UML to meet their needs. Organizations needing support should look at Poseidon, a commercial implementation of Argo/UML (www.gentleware.com).

—Warren Keuffel

Codagen Architect
Codagen

In the never-ending quest to automate, Codagen Architect 3.0 steps up to the plate. This development process tool integrates with your favorite UML modeling tool, including Rational Rose, Together ControlCenter and Visio 2002 UML—a list that should cover most serious architects’ needs. Using a model-driven architecture approach, Codagen generates up to 100 percent of your application’s architecture source code and typically 70–90 percent of the total application code that can fit into either a J2EE or .NET framework, or both, the remainder (usually the business logic) to be created by the developer. Language support includes Microsoft Visual Basic, C#, C++ and Java. What makes this product stand out? It generates only pure source without any reference to a Codagen module, component or framework.

—Sue Spielman

SmartDraw
SmartDraw.com

SmartDraw is like discovering a gold mine and finding out it’s easy to get at the gold. This multiple award–winning product bows to your command: Want to draw a map? Simple. How about drawing a house plan with doors and windows? No problem. A UML diagram, organizational and flow charts, timelines, calendars, engineering and software designs? All easy to do, at various levels of detail, with expert results. SmartDraw’s secret? Symbol libraries—plenty of them, with more available on the SmartDraw website, offering free and full integration with MS Office for design and export. Along the way, SmartDraw makes drawing easier, yet more powerful. I’ve already made the switch.

—Rosalyn Lum

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