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.
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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 continues the steady evolution of this long-time developer’s
friend. DevPartner 7.0’s design enables you to track and trace the
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in mixed environments, too. 1997 Jolt Award winner. —Roland Racko |
RoboHelp X3
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
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
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