http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/3795991

Winners of the Developer.com Product of the Year 2009 Are Announced
By Rosemarie Graham

Nominations to find the best products and technology began in September and the submissions this year were abundant. With finalist announced in November, voting began. The voting made it very clear which products were to win. Not only were more votes received than in the last two years, but there was also a clear margin of victory between first and second place.

In the past due to close races, runner ups were also recognized. This year there were no close calls. Each winner won its category with a respectable margin. In the case of Java Tools the winner had almost three times the votes of the others finalists in the category combined.

It is no surprise that the Development Tool category received the most votes. The second most popular category continues to be Open Source. Looking back over the last two years this shouldn't be surprising at all. The top two categories last year were Development Tool and Open Source. Two years ago the top categories were Wireless/Mobile and Open Source.

But, who won?

The finalists from each category are listed with the winner first followed by the remaining finalists in alphabetical order. Simply making it as a finalist is worthy of congratulations. It is worth noting that in the past Sun has been able to dominate many categories, but it took multiple products to achieve that distinction. This year one product, NetBeans, dominated the categories by winning five out of twelve.
Technology

Winner: RIAs (Rich Internet Applications)

* Agile Development
* AOP (Aspect-Oriented Programming)
* Cloud Computing
* SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture)
* Social Networking

Framework

Winner: Spring Framework and the Hibernate Framework

* Apache Wicket Framework
* Merb 1.0 Framework
* Microsoft® .Net Framework 3.5
* Rails Framework

Development Tool

Winner: NetBeans Platform

* ComponentOne® Studio® Enterprise
* Eclipse Platform
* Visual Studio® 2008
* VMware Workstation 6.5

Development Utilities

Winner: NetBeans Profiler

* ANTS Profiler v3™
* JUnit
* Visual Assist X
* VisualVM

Web Service

Winner: REST (Representational State Transfer)

* Amazon Web Services
* Force.com™
* Microsoft® Live™.com Services
* zembly

Wireless/Mobile

Winner: NetBeans Mobility Pack for Connected Device Configuration (CDC) 5.5

* Android
* iPhone SDK
* Visual Studio® 2008
* Sybase PocketBuilder™

Database Tool

Winner: MySQL™ workbench

* Altova DatabaseSpy® 2008
* LINQ (Microsoft® .NET Language Integrated Query)
* SQL Server® 2008 Reporting Services
* Oracle SQL Developer

Java Tool

Winner: NetBeans IDE

* Eclipse SQL Explorer
* Glassfish Application Server
* Hudson
* javacc™

JSR

Winner: JSR 220: Enterprise JavaBeans™ 3.0

* JSR 241: The Groovy Programming Language
* JSR 249: Mobile Service Architecture 2
* JSR 286: Portlet Specification 2.0
* JSR-296: Swing Application Framework

.NET Tool

Winner: Mono 2.0

* Altova® XMLSpy®
* Microsoft® Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
* Microsoft® Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
* NAnt

Open Source

Winner: NetBeans

* Android
* Drupal CMS
* Eclipse
* Merb 1.0 Framework
* Mono 2.0

Security

Winner: OpenSSO Enterprise

* AppArmor ("Application Armor")
* Crowd
* Metasploit
* Untangle Gateway

Congratulations to the finalists and especially to all the winners.