The winners of the 14th annual JOLT awards were announced last night in Santa Clara at SDWest.

My favorite two entries, java.net and Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates' "Head First Java" were finalists but didn't win. There were many cool and impressive finalists this year and the awards were a lot of fun, but I continue to think that Head First Java can be misunderstood by many. If you don't read it, it is easy to thumb through it and dismiss it as being light or cute or something like that. But when you read it, you realize that although they have taken a different pedagogical approach, the material is not dumbed down and the topics being covered get readers pretty far into programming in Java in an introductory book.

That isn't to take away from the other fine books that were Productivity Award winners (runners up). In General books these were "The Art of UNIX Programming" by Eric S. Raymond, "Lean Software Development" by Mary and Tom Poppendieck, and "Pragmatic Starter Kit" by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt. In the technical books the runners up were "About Face 2.0" by Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann, Scott Ambler's "Agile Database Techniques", and Diomidis Spinellis' "Code Reading".

Follow the link in Also in Java Today, to this year's JOLT award winners were named last night in Santa Clara. As I mentioned, java.net was a finalist in the Websites and Developer Networks category in which the productivity awards went to O'Reilly Network, the JavaRanch, and Tigris with developerWorks winning the excellence award. Other Excellence award winners were Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister's book "Waltzing with Bears", Dave Astels "Test-Driven Development", eclipse, Hibernate, and Sun's J2ME Wireless Toolkit. Dreamweaver won the Hall of Fame award and P.J. Plauger was the recipient of the Dr. Dobbs Excellence in Programming award.

Jason Hunter continues his series on XQuery Tricks and Tips. In part three he advises that the "focus in this article on important but tricky and commonly misunderstood aspects of the XQuery language. I warn you: Things will get hairy beyond this point. But it's better to have fair warning of the complex parts than to have to deduce it on your own when your query fails."

In today's Weblogs , John Catherino blogs about his java.net project in The World Wide Virtual Machine. He writes that his cajo project "allows any Virtual Machine to easily expose access to any of its selected objects to Remote Virtual Machines, as well as to send any of its selected objects to RVMs. It offers a very simple yet highly flexible framework for applications to work together. Most importantly, any existing object can be made remotely usable, with no changes to its source; an application simply adds this framework, not restructures around its requirements."

Attention webloggers There continues to be some sort of glitch in the system that is being addressed. For now to create a new entry you should login and then go to the weblog home page.

In today's Projects and Communities , Are you using the latest version of TableSorter? The Java Tutorial page Sorting and Otherwise Manipulating Data describes the latest features.

The WS and XML community has launched a new subcommunity to focus on the Java Web Services Developer Pack .

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• NetBeans 3.6 RC 1
• Zoe Interwingle 0.5.7 Stable
• JamP 0.522
• Tapestry 3.0 beta1
• blojsom 2.13
• Bellvue 1.5

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Current and upcoming Java Events :

• March 15-19 Software Developer Conference West
• March 19-21 Gateway Java Software Symposium
• March 22-26 Game Developers Conference, 2004
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