TMC announced today the Who's Who in Enterprise Java 2004 award winners. The list is published as a deck of cards and is the first award to acknowledge the contribution and leadership of individuals across the entire spectrum of enterprise Java.

Checkout the Who's Who in Enterprise Java 2004.

The Who's Who in Enterprise Java initiative recognizes 54 individuals for their contributions in five categories:

Power and Influence (Spades): Acknowledges individuals who have proven to be a strong and reckoning force in influencing platform APIs or the development practices used by practitioners.
Ace: Jeff Jackson, VP of Sun J2EE platform and application server engineering, is a main driver behind the J2EE compatibility program.

Entrepreneurship (Diamonds): Highlights people who are the risk takers and commercial innovators, both successful and unsuccessful, betting their companies on new ideas.
Ace: Graham Glass built the popular Glue Web services framework and sold it to webMethods.

Contribution (Hearts): Credits individuals whose new ideas, initiatives, tools and technologies can be considered a major contribution by virtue of the impact their work has on the community.
Ace: Gavin King, founder of Hibernate, a widely adopted open source O/R mapper.

Pot Pourri (Clubs): Highlights individuals for a variety of multi-faceted accomplishments.
Ace: Erich Gamma is a leader in Eclipse, Junit and author of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

Jokers: Represents a disruptive force for good or evil in the enterprise Java industry and is also an individual who is recognizable, identifiable, infamous, political, outspoken and controversial.
Marc Fluery jokered the commercial industry by acquiring $10M in funding for JBoss, Inc.
Hani Suleiman authors entertaining and controversial BileBlog.

"It's an honor to be recognized as a leader in enterprise Java," said Graham Glass, CTO at webMethods and Ace of Diamonds for Entrepreneurship on the Who's Who list. "The Java community continues to strive to raise the standards for consistency, functionality and overall performance in Java development. I have great respect for all of the contributors driving specifications and shaping product innovations in the community today."

Award recipients were gathered from a list of names volunteered by TheServerSide.com community members, press, media, invited industry experts and The Middleware Company employees. The list was refined by a number of third party experts and confidants to narrow the field, categorized by their achievement and ranked by impact.

Honorees attending TheServerSide Java Symposium 2004 in Las Vegas will be awarded a plaque and decks of cards.

"I'm pleased that The Middleware Company and TheServerSide Communities are recognizing and promoting the individuals who are driving change and forging the next generation of enterprise Java," said Jeff Jackson, vice president of engineering for the J2EE Platform at Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Ace of Spades for Power and Influence on the Who's Who list. "It's a real honor to be among the first group of people recognized."

Congragulations to all the people who made it to the Who's Who in Enterprise Java 2004!

Hani and Marc Fluery in the same scene !

Is designating Hani as a Joker the revenge of TSS for this article?

There is no "revenge". Being the joker isn't meant to be a bad thing...

We have a good relationship with Hani, and he is going to be at TheServerSide Symposium this week. Hopefully his blog coverage will not be too brutal! :)

Cheers,

Dion

You could do worse than the Joker category. At this rate Hani will soon be announcing that Bileblog Enterprises has received $10m in venture funding. Of course, you'd have to play a hand that included some of the other people in that card deck first.

Was Rolf considered Hors Concour for the joker prize? ;)

Cheers!
Henrique Steckelberg

I'd like to point out a snippet from the who's who FAQ.

How were the jokers selected? Are these insults?

When preparing a deck of cards for distribution, you have to have joker cards. The people representing jokers in this deck needed to meet certain qualifications:

Be a disruptive force for good or evil to the enterprise Java industry
Be recognizable, identifiable, and, to a certain degree, infamous
Be political, controversial and outspoken

When preparing the joker nomination, our list grew as high as 10 individuals who met these criteria! In the end, we selected the jokers that were having the biggest impact on the industry.

These selections are far from insults. In fact, we hope that our joker selections view them as compliments as being a joker is a bigger distinction than any of our Aces.

And, at TMC, most of us consider ourselves jokers and there were those internally who sobbed when they weren’t selected!

Tyler
The Middleware Company

hmm no rickard oberg in there but there is Martin Nally, "driver for service data objects" interesting choices to say the least

The joker title is really not appropriate!! You could do better than that..

Natalie Fleury is there and Rickard Oberg is not there? Oh my God...

Natalie Fleury is there and Rickard Oberg is not there? Oh my God...

I agree but Rickard has been in silent-mode, not as loud as he used to be for at least a year. Nothing wrong with that of course, personal choice. He is very active in AOP stuff but maybe this is not enough. There is also a new star being born, Mike Spille, who is not in the list, even though he has been actively educating java community on xa/nio and participating in hot discussions for months. I would be pleased to see him on the list but maybe next year if he keeps blogging like that. Overall, I like the list, I think it is fair enough. Part of the criteria is who is the making noise/news not necessarily the best? Maybe in the future, process of making the list will involve a nomination stage and voting... Thanks TSS, very nice work!

I agree but Rickard has been in silent-mode, not as loud as he used to be for at least a year. Nothing wrong with that of course, personal choice.

Yup, been busy doing RealLife stuff. I guess in a way being "silent" on the net can be a good sign. I don't have nearly as much time as before to just talk. So much to do and so little time.

Anyway, thanks for the credit, I appreciate it.

Back to coding.

Natalie Fleury is there and Rickard Oberg is not there? Oh my God...

I agree but Rickard has been in silent-mode, not as loud as he used to be for at least a year.

Indeed. A lot of very worthy people, including James Gosling and Rickard Oberg were nominated; however, activity in the past 12-16 months was an important criteria by which the selection committee weighed people, and that was the reason for why some of the big names that would usually come to mind are not here.

It is our hope that the Who's who will have a positive impact on the community as it will encourage awareness of both the known and the unknown, and also encourage people to be more active so as to be recognized in future Who's who lists. If we did not have a time selection criteria then it would be more difficult to fulfill that vision.

Floyd

It might be too late... but, IMHO, there are a few people who are worth noting.
(i) Rod Johnson and Jorgen Holler - for the Spring Framework;
(ii) Rickard Oberg - a novel, typed approach to AOP;
(iii) Mike Spille - for Emberio (even though it's in Alpha), and for fighting daemons of SD;
(iv) Ted Neward - Ted, when is your new book due?
(v) Thomas Kyte - his latest book is a great source of insights for everyone working with a RDBMS, not just Oracle.
Thank you guys, your thoughts and insights have been inspirational.

For the kind of commitment they give to the Java initiative, at least one of the main traibosses need to be in the list.

For the kind of commitment they give to the Java initiative, at least one of the main traibosses need to be in the list.

Kishore, the folks at Java Ranch are certainly deserving, but this is not a list about "Java", it's about "Enterprise Java". That's probably why they weren't in our radar.

Floyd

they sure do lot of free help(tutoring) for Enterprise Java aswell.

Many people are benifited in their projects because of that.

I take back my statement.

Richard Monson-Haefel is from JavaRanch. Thanks for some recognition.

Gregor Kiczales' name is shown as George on the list. The name is correct on the card.

Gregor Kiczales' name is shown as George on the list. The name is correct on the card.

Thanks for catching this. It's fixed.

I like the card deck with the who is who persons...I hope for them that nobody missunderstands the cards and calls the CIA to deport them to Guantanamo Bay...would be a big loss for the Java community :-)