Awards and opinion polls are funny things, don't you think? In general, you read them with interest and suddenly you find yourself believing what they're saying. You then go and tell others about them, disseminating the information as the gospel truth. How many times have you found yourself saying to someone, "Yes, it's the most popular product?" As if saying it gives you justification for using the beast. Have you ever read the wee small writing at the bottom of any of these polls? If you haven't, you should. It may shock you to discover just how few people they "polled" for this definitive guide. How can such a small group of people truly represent the mass population?

The same goes for readers' awards polls. When the claim is that such-and-such and thus-and-so are the most popular products, yet it's backed up with only 400 or so results, you'd be more than suspicious. However, some leading magazines attempt to pass this off on you, hoping you won't notice. Sadly, JDJ will have to stand apart from the crowd. For when it runs its annual Readers' Choice Awards, we actually get over 20% of our readers casting their votes. More than 20,000 of you took the time this year to vote for a wide range of products, and we'd like to thank you for making this readers' award poll meaningful.

And the Winner Is...
So with the number 20,000 as "proof," let's have a quick look at some of the winners.

The most popular category has to be "Best IDE." This is one piece of software that becomes a very close friend of developers as we sit hour after hour deploying our solutions. For the second year running, IBM's VisualAge takes the top place, with my favorite IDE, Metrowerks' CodeWarrior, coming in at position 7. Interesting to see that all those that made the decision to go to VisualAge are still happy with that decision.

The winner of the "Best Application Server" went to Apple's WebObjects, for the second year running. It was good to see Apache's JServ come up the ranks from last year's poll to grab the third slot. And good to see that many of you rate the free alternative above many of the big commercial brands.

In the "Best Application" category there was a major change of heart from you all. Last year's runner-up, Jasmine, came in at position 12, with Together/J pulling the majority of the votes for the top place.

An interesting category that I was keeping a particular eye on was the "Best Database Product." I wanted to discover just where the heavyweights would place - it was no great surprise to see Oracle 8i taking the number one slot, outstripping Sybase'svotes by more than double.

Sometimes there's one winner that stands head and shoulders above the rest, and an example of this can be found in the "Best Book" category in which Java in a Nutshell by David Flanagan took the majority of the votes. Taking this in context, removing all the specialized Java books, Java in a Nutshell was obviously the choice of the majority of developers as being a great all-around Java book that deserves some real estate on your bookshelf.

In the "Most Innovative Java Product" category, VisualAge took the honors for the second year running, with JDeveloper coming in second. It's interesting when the tool you know and love is the one that picks up the majority of the votes.

A new category this year was the "Best Virtual Machine," with Sun's HotSpot picking up the majority of the votes to beat ChaiVM.

These awards are indicative of what you, the readers, think, and as can be seen, the categories were varied and thoughtfully voted on. If you're popping along to JavaCon 2000 in Santa Clara, California, September 24-27, stop by and meet some of the vendors that have won your votes. Let them know what you think. That's what they're there for.

To this end, we put a closed lid on this year's awards, but be sure to stick around: we'll need you again next year!