CMP Media's Software Development Magazine Announces Winners for the 2005 Readers' Choice Awards

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CMP Media's Software Development magazine editorial team is pleased to announce the winners of the third annual Readers' Choice Awards. The winners were announced at the SD Best Practices conference in Boston to a crowd of nearly 1,000.

This year new categories included Best Employer, Best Scripting Language and Best GUIs.

"We're always looking for ways to recognize the best products and vendors in software development; therefore, we've evolved the Readers' Choice Awards program to look at the different aspects of the development process," noted Software Development magazine Technical Editor Rosalyn Lum. "Last year, the Fortune 500 dominated the winner's list, but this year we're also recognizing lesser-known products from small to medium-sized companies, and we're very pleased with the results."

Voting is controlled by sending an invitation to Software Development readers containing a personal identification number ensuring that votes made using a duplicate PIN can be removed; all suspect votes were eliminated from the data pool. Also, the editors tracked voters' Internet domains and found no correlation between corporate domains (such as Oracle.com) and products from the same company.

"Popularity contests are tricky to manage, but we think that in our third year of the Software Development Readers' Choice Awards, we've achieved a balance. The trick is to recognize not only ubiquity, but quality and customer loyalty. The wider variety of winners this year shows that, despite the dominance of a handful of companies with vast installed bases, it's possible for newer and smaller concerns to shine as well," said Editor in Chief of Software Development magazine Alexandra Weber Morales. The 2005 Software Development magazine Readers' Choice Awards winners are: Best Employer (Overall)

Winner: Google

Runners-up:

Amazon.com

IBM

Sun Microsystems Best Employer (Small to Medium-Sized Business)

Winner: McAfee

Runners-up:

MKS

SAS

Sybase Best GUI (Overall)

Winner: Visual Studio (Microsoft)

Runners-up:

Delphi (Borland)

Eclipse Platform (Eclipse Foundation)

Mac OS X Tiger (Apple) Best GUI (Small to Medium-Sized Business)

Winner: Delphi (Borland)

Runners-up:

Eclipse Platform (Eclipse Foundation)

IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains)

Qt (Trolltech) Best Open Source Tool

Winner: Eclipse (Eclipse Foundation)

Runners-up:

GCC (Free Software Foundation)

Perl (Larry Wall)

Tomcat (Apache Software Foundation) Best Scripting Language

Winner: Perl (Larry Wall)

Runners-up:

Python (Guido van Rossum)

PHP (PHP)

Ruby (Yukihiro Matsumoto) Best Technical Support

Winner: developerWorks (IBM)

Runners-up:

Apple (Apple)

IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains)

Oracle Database (Oracle) Best Technical Support (Small to Medium-Sized Business)

Winner: IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains)

Runners-up:

SAS (SAS)

Qt (Trolltech)

DevPartner Studio (Compuware) Most Innovative Tool

Winner: VMTN (VMware)

Runners-up:

IntelliJ IDEA (JetBrains)

MindManager (Mindjet)

Perforce (Perforce)

QuickBase (Intuit) Most Robust Tool

Winner: Linux (Linus Torvalds)

Runners-up:

CodeWright (Borland)

OpenBSD.org

OS X (Apple)

Rational Application Developer (IBM)

VMware GSX Server (VMware) Most Tried and True

Winner: Visual Studio (Microsoft)

Runners-up:

Apache Web Server (Apache Software Foundation)

Linux (Linus Torvalds)

Eclipse (Eclipse Foundation) Most Tried and True (Small to Medium-Sized Business)

Winner: Apache Web Server (Apache Software Foundation)

Runners-up:

Linux (Linus Torvalds)

Eclipse (Eclipse Foundation)

GNU Emacs (Free Software Foundation) More information on Software Development magazine and the Readers' Choice Awards is available at http://www.sdmagazine.com. About Software Development magazine

Software Development is the leading magazine for software development managers: the definitive source to empower those who implement and manage teams, technologies, practices and tools integral to successful development projects. Software Development is a monthly publication reaching over 100,000 subscribers. Software Development readers, are trailblazing managers who care passionately about enlivening and expediting the task of delivering successful software on time and under budget. About CMP Media LLC

CMP Media (http://www.cmp.com) is the leading integrated media solutions company providing "broad and deep" access to the entire technology spectrum -- the builders, sellers and buyers of technology worldwide. The company's comprehensive database of technology decision makers enables marketers to reach targeted audiences throughout the purchase process with publications, web offerings, face-to-face events, consulting and other marketing services that deliver actionable results.

Editorial Contacts:

Rosalyn Lum, Technical Editor

Software Development magazine

415-947-6182; rlum@cmp.com PR Contact:

Kate Adams, Marketing Director

Software Development magazine

415-947-6165; kadams@cmp.com