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The 16th Annual Duke's Choice Award Nominations Are In!

The nominations for the 16th annual Duke's Choice Awards closed this week. The winners will be announced at The Developer Conference Formerly Known as JavaOne in October. (Okay, it's Oracle Code One. I'll get used to it eventually.)

Duke, of course, is the official Java mascot, a red-nosed, triangular thingamajig that cartwheeled across our screens to oo's and ah's back in the day, when Java was the Green Project. He (I'm assuming here) was created by graphic artists, Joe Palrang, who would later work on animated movies, including "Shrek," "Over the Hedge" and "Flushed Away," and he/she/it was open sourced along with Java SE and Java ME in 2006.

The awards named for the little guy "celebrate extreme innovation using Java technology," Oracle says on its Web site. Big O is running the event, of course, but the nominations come from the community. Nominations from just about anyone are accepted, including Oracle employees and ambitious self-promoters. You can nominate a project, person, product, service, or "any program related to Java innovation."

The judging levels the field, Oracle says: "The primary judging criterion for this prestigious award is innovation, putting small developer shops and individual developers on an equal footing with global giants."

Nine winners were selected last year in what I think was meant to be a nod to Java 9. All nine received full conference passes JavaOne, winner badges, and a Duke statue, inclusion in Oracle corporate social media programs, and perhaps most important, community recognition as elite members of the Java ecosystem.

While we wait for the results to be announced at Oracle Code One (See? I just needed five paragraphs to get there.) I think it worth re-acknowledging last year's winners. From a lightweight Docker interface to a tool designed to tackle the extremely complex challenges associated with optimal interplanetary trajectory design, it's an impressive lineup:

  1. Rapid Dashboard (Hakan Ozler)
    Lightweight Docker developer interface for Docker remote API.
  2. The Java Terminal Project (Rahman Usta)
    Provides the ability to run a fully featured terminal emulator on Linux, Mac and Windows. Supports Cloud and Web apps.
  3. Robo4J (Marcus Hirt & Miroslav Wengner)
    A framework to quickly start building and running robots and IoT devices.
  4. jHipster (Matt Raible)
    A development platform to develop and deploy Spring Boot + Angular Web applications and Spring microservices.
  5. On Board (Bert Ertman)
    Collects real-time sensor data from marine vessels to provide captains and crew performance info.
  6. U en Linea - Catholic University Luis Amigo (Hilmer Chona)
    Heart of the University information system started in 2010, has student developer input, and runs on Oracle VM server cluster with WebLogic and Oracle DB
  7. ControlsFX (Jonathan Giles)
    Library for developers of JavaFX applications with huge download stats.
  8. Deep Space Trajectory Explorer (Sean Phillips)
    Created to tackle the challenges of interplanetary trajectory design.
  9. Latin America Virtual JUG (Cesar Hernandez) Collaboration among Spanish speaking JUGs in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Guatemala and Panama. Together, delivered a full day of Spanish content on Cloud Day Mexico City.

Posted by John K. Waters on August 14, 2018