Five projects took home top honours at the JAX Innovation Awards 2006, produced and presented by Software and Support Media. Over 1,600 participants attended the awards ceremony in Wiesbaden, Germany, the venue of the JAX, Enterprise Architektur Konferenz and Eclipse Forum Europe 2006.

The projects that took the top honours at the JAX Innovation Awards 2006 are:

• 1st Prize (10,000 Euro): Spring Framework
  
• 2nd Prize (5,000 Euro): E-Chalk
  
• 3rd Prize (2,000 Euro): Bioclipse
  
• 4th Prize (1,000 Euro): RAP
  
• 5th Prize (1,000 Euro): World of Java
  
• Audience Award (1,000 Euro): Bioclipse

Members of the JAX Innovation Award Jury included experts from the industry, such as Daniel Adelhardt (Sun Java Ambassador), Adam Bien (IT consultant, Java Magazin author), Erich Gamma (IBM Distinguished Engineer, Eclipse Java Development Tools Project Lead), Sebastian Meyen (Editor in Chief of the Java Magazin, Program Chair JAX) and Bola Rotibi (Analyst at Ovum).

The decisive criteria for the selection of the winners were innovation, creativity, elegance, and practical relevance. Sebastian Meyen confirmed the high quality of the contributions: “The numerous proposals handed in for the Award have impressively demonstrated the vitality of the IT field in Europe. Various companies, academic facilities or open source organizations have really pushed and come up with fascinating ideas, products and projects, thus having made it a difficult task to determine the winners.”

The jury adjudged Spring’s proposal to be the best and awarded it the 1st prize. “The innovation of Spring lies in the brilliantly solved integration of different technologies. Spring’s contribution for the Java community is the clear simplification of many complex tasks in Java,” the jury said.

In addition to this, the audience at the venue selected an ‘Audience Award’ out of the ten final proposals, which was awarded to Bioclipse. Bioclipse also walked away with the 3rd Prize.
According to Software and Support Media, the JAX Innovation Award is aimed at promoting and fostering European software development, besides supporting groundbreaking innovations of European businesses and organizations.

Contributions to the JAX Innovation Award were received from corporations and individuals, open source projects, universities, and other European organizations that have rendered enviable contributions to the world of Java and Eclipse.

Presentations of the 50 proposals, from which ten were invited to the awards ceremony, as well as further information on the awards are available on the JAX Innovation Awards website.