TechWeb today announced the finalists for this year's Jolt Product Excellence Awards. 65 finalists in 13 categories were chosen by a team of esteemed industry insiders, columnists, and technology leaders. The awards ceremony will take place on March 11, 2009 at the annual Software Development Conference & Expo West at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Free Expo passes which include access to the Jolt Awards and other special events are available at .

For the past 18 years, the Jolt Product Excellence Awards have been presented annually to showcase products that have "jolted" the industry with their significance and made the task of creating software faster, easier, and more efficient. The awards presentation is sponsored by JOLT, the fabled soft drink quaffed by software developers for sustenance during project development marathons.

"The Jolt judges have selected these finalists from the nearly 300 qualified nominations that were submitted online. The submissions represent the many innovative tools available for every phase of the software development lifecycle," said Amber Ankerholz, Jolt Award Project Manager. "This year's finalist round was extremely competitive and we appreciate the effort all of the participants put into showcasing their products' features for the judges."

In the next round of the Jolt Award process, the judges will examine the finalists according to the standard criteria of audience suitability, productivity, innovation, quality, ROI, risk, and flexibility. They focus on products that are ahead of the curve, universally useful, rich in functionality or that were solutions to problems in their product space.

One Jolt Award and two Productivity Awards will be presented in each category. Jolt Product Excellence Award winners will receive the now legendary trophy that features a can of JOLT cola encased in Lucite. The finalists are:

Books (General)

* Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior by Tom Demarco, Peter Hruschka, Tim Lister, Suzanne Robertson, James Robertson, and Steve McMenamin (Dorset House Publishing)
* Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software by Steven C. Seow (Addison-Wesley Professional)
* Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development by Scott L. Bain (Addison-Wesley Professional)
* Intellectual Property and Open Source by Van Lindberg (O'Reilly Media)
* Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt (Pragmatic Bookshelf)

Books (Technical)

* High Performance MySQL by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, Jeremy Zawodny, Arjen Lentz, Derek J. Balling (O'Reilly Media)
* Java Power Tools by John Ferguson Smart (O'Reilly Media)
* Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, and Bill Venners (Artima Press)
* Real World Haskell by John Goerzen, Bryan O'Sullivan, Donald Bruce Stewart (O'Reilly Media)
* The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK by Erica Sadun (Addison-Wesley Professional)

Change and Configuration Management Tools

* AccuRev (AccuRev)
* Change Manager (Embarcadero Technologies)
* JetBrains TeamCity (JetBrains TeamCity)
* OpenMake Meister (OpenMake Software)
* Plastic SCM (Codice Software)

Database Engines and Data Tools

* Altova DatabaseSpy (Altova)
* Aqua Data Studio (AquaFold)
* ER/Studio(R) Enterprise Portal (Embarcadero Technologies)
* Postgres Plus (EnterpriseDB)
* Vertica Analytic Database (Vertica Systems)

Design Tools and Modeling

* BigLever Software Gears (BigLever Software)
* Blueprint Requirements Center (Blueprint Software Systems)
* RAVEN (Ravenflow)
* Screen Architect (Screen Architect Limited/Catch Limited)
* WindowBuilder Pro (Instantiations)

Development Environments

* Altova MissionKit (Altova)
* JBuilder(R) 2008 (Embarcadero Technologies)
* Komodo IDE (ActiveState Software)
* ReSharper 4.1 (JetBrains)
* Servoy (Servoy)

Enterprise Tools

* Adobe LiveCycle Content Services ES (Adobe Systems)
* Agile Platform (OutSystems)
* MindTouch Deki (MindTouch)
* Rally Enterprise (Rally Software Development)
* Zenoss Core (Zenoss)

Libraries, Frameworks and Components

* ComponentOne Studio for Silverlight (ComponentOne)
* Essential Studio Enterprise Edition (Syncfusion)
* NetAdvantage for .NET (Infragistics)
* RadControls for .NET (Telerik)
* Threading Building Blocks Library 2.1 (Intel)

Mobile and Web Development Tools

* 3rdRail for Ruby on Rails (Embarcadero Technologies)
* Adobe Device Central (Adobe Systems)
* MITE (Keynote Systems)
* NetBeans (Sun Microsystems)
* Yahoo! SearchMonkey (Yahoo!)

Project Management Tools

* CASE Spec (CASE Spec)
* Pivotal Tracker (Pivotal Labs)
* Rally Enterprise (Rally Software Development)
* ScrumWorks Pro (Danube Technologies)
* TargetProcess (TargetProcess)

Security Tools

* Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES (Adobe Systems)
* Crowd (Atlassian)
* GuardIT(R) (Arxan)
* InTrust for Databases (Quest Software)
* Parasoft Application Security Solution (Parasoft)

Testing Tools

* Clover (Atlassian)
* Compuware DevPartner Studio (Compuware)
* Easyb (easyb.org)
* IBM Rational Software Analyzer (IBM)
* SONAR (SonarSource)

Utilities

* Compuware DevPartner Studio (Compuware)
* DotTrace (JetBrains)
* HttpWatch (Simtec Limited)
* JavaRebel (ZeroTurnaround)
* PowerGadgets (SoftwareFX)

Complete Jolt Awards details are available at .

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