Jolt Awards: Coding Tools

Andrew Binstock, January 09, 2012 Going to the very heart of the developer's toolbox, we select four outstanding tools.
  • E-mail
  • Print
  • ShareShare

Jolt Awards: Coding Tools

The Jolt Awards in the category of Coding address the past 12 months' innovation in tools that help developers do the actual work of creating code. This category comprises editors, IDEs, code analysis tools, SCM products, debuggers, and the like. In essence, it's a mature category of hands-on tools that everybody uses at some point.

As in previous years, the judges — Robert Del Rossi, David Dossot, Gary K. Evans, Jonathan Hartley, Larry O'Brien, Gary Pollice, Mike Riley, Rick Wayne, and I — pored over the nominees, selected finalists, and put the top products through their paces to establish the #1 coding tool, to which we accorded the 2012 Jolt Award. The two runners-up (in a very close competition this time) receive Jolt Productivity Awards. And in this particular category, the #4 product, from CloudBees, was included for special distinction because we strongly feel it indicates an important new direction in coding. The product is still in its infancy, but we think its importance to the market warrants inclusion for a special award.

All products were tested on the judges' regular coding platforms as well as on virtual machines, some of which were hosted by Rackspace, due to the company's generous sponsorship of the Jolt awards. — Andrew Binstock.

Note: To nominate products for upcoming Jolt categories, see the Jolt Award nomination page.


INFO-LINK




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 

Best of the Web

First C Compiler Now on Github

The earliest known C compiler by the legendary Dennis Ritchie has been published on the repository.

Quick Read

HTML5 Mobile Development: Seven Good Ideas (and Three Bad Ones)

HTML5 Mobile Development: Seven Good Ideas (and Three Bad Ones)

Quick Read

Building Bare Metal ARM Systems with GNU

All you need to know to get up and running... and programming on ARM

Quick Read

Amazon's Vogels Challenges IT: Rethink App Dev

Amazon Web Services CTO says promised land of cloud computing requires a new generation of applications that follow different principles.

Quick Read

How to Select a PaaS Partner

Eventually, the vast majority of Web applications will run on a platform-as-a-service, or PaaS, vendor's infrastructure. To help sort out the options, we sent out a matrix with more than 70 decision points to a variety of PaaS providers.

Quick Read


More "Best of the Web" >>