Last month I introduced to you the winners of the 4th JCP Program Annual Awards. But the story is only half told. To get the full picture and understand how tight the competition was, I'm inviting you to meet the runners-up for the JCP Program awards - those who came very close to winning the top honors this year. They are among the top performers to watch in the months and year ahead.

JBoss came close to winning in the JCP Member of the Year category. The company's active participation in the community was noticed by peers and juries. JBoss is involved in a wide range of JSR efforts, including EJB 3.0, Java EE 5, and Web services and provides input and feedback from both developer and user angles.

So did NTT DoCoMo, known in the community as an early adopter of Java technology for handsets. Winner of the "Duke's Choice Award" at JavaOne 2005 for its Java technology-based i-mode FeliCa service, NTT DoCoMo has contributed its rich expertise in running mobile Java services to many of the Java ME Expert Groups in which it participates.

Sun Microsystems, the original creator of the Java technology and specification lead for a wide range of JSRs, was also a runner up in this category. Working with other community members, Sun recently finalized major simplifications to the Java enterprise programming model in JSR 244, Java EE 5, and is in the process of revising the core Java specifications in JSR 270, Java SE 6 (Mustang).

A strong contender for the winner's place in the Most Innovative Java ME JSR category was JSR 248, the first of two specifications developed by the Mobile Service Architecture (MSA) initiative, a group of 14 major mobile industry players represented on the JSR Expert Group. The spec leads are from Nokia Corporation and Vodafone Group Services. The focus of the JSR is to specify an unfragmented, backward-compatible application development platform that supports a set of key APIs to a wide variety of features provided by the latest mass market-oriented handsets and mobile networks today and in the near future.

Led by Motorola and BenQ Corporation, JSR 253, Mobile Telephony API (MTA), stood out too and vied for top honors. The specification enables applications to incorporate telephony features and controls directly into their operation, avoiding the need to pass focus to another application. One example of this might be in a multi-player game that allows a voice call to be placed to other players in the game for strategy discussion (or taunting the enemies). Another use is the ability to incorporate a feature such as calling out to a help desk without exiting the application.

Another contender for the top innovation in the Java ME category was JSR 281, IMS Services API. This API enables application programmers to easily create applications offering multimedia communication services in close integration with IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) according to applicable standards. In this way, IMS domain, with all the advantages of merged Internet and telco technologies, will be revealed to the broad Java ME developer community and will encourage faster adoption of the IMS services provided by the wireless networks.

Currently the Spec Lead of JSR 257, Contactless Communication API, and JSR 293, Location API 2.0, Jaana Majakangas of Nokia Corporation came again on the jury's radar screen as a great candidate in the Outstanding Java ME Spec Lead category. Jaana has been a member of the JCP from August 2003 and has consistently participated in JSR development including for JSRs 218, 219, 257, 271, and 293.

Volker Bauche's work for JSR 228, Information Module Profile - Next Generation (IMP-NG), and co-spec leadership of JSR 281, IMS Services API, with other colleagues from BenQ and Ericsson brought him the nomination for Outstanding Java ME Spec Lead. Bauche works in the R&D department of BenQ Mobile as lead of a team specializing in middleware projects.

On the JSR watch list o f developers around the world, JSR 244, Java EE 5, was a natural candidate for the top place in the Most Innovative Java SE/EE JSR category. The JCP EC votes put it in the runner-up race for all the right reasons. Java EE 5 is the most significant release of the Java EE platform since the first version, J2EE 1.2. It enhances the programming model, making it much easier to write enterprise applications. Java EE 5 makes extensive use of Java language annotations to simplify the declarative programming style of Java EE.

Another leading specification, JSR 220, EJB 3.0, was among the top nominations in the Most Innovative Java SE/EE JSR. Its characteristics did not escape the JCP EC jury as highly innovative in a number of ways. It is the first within the group of Java EE specifications that takes advantage of the new features of annotation metadata and parameterized types in Java SE 5. In particular, it defines a strategy for annotations usage subsequently adopted by JSR 244 for the Java EE Platform.

Three great spec leads competed for the top award in the Outstanding Java SE/EE Spec Lead group.

Jose R. Cronembold is a senior development manager at Oracle Corporation. He designed and implemented the Oracle JDeveloper's IDE framework. He has extensive experience in developing IDEs. In addition to Oracle JDeveloper, he has worked on two other IDEs: UIMX: a C++ IDE for developing Motif-based applications, and Visual Age for Basic: a Visual Basic compatible IDE. Currently he is an observer of JSR 227, A Standard Data Binding and Data Access Facility for J2EE.

Ed Burns has worked on a variety of Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) projects in roles ranging from individual contributor to team leader to architect. He co-authored a book, JavaServer Faces: The Complete Reference, which will be available in August 2006.

Ed got involved with the JCP program when he became co-Spec Lead of JSR 127, JavaServer Faces, in October 2002, at the beginning of the JSF development life cycle, and he continued in that role with JSR 252, JavaServer Faces 1.2.

Stefan Hepper works for the IBM development lab in Bšblingen, Germany, and he is the lead architect for the WebSphere Portal, Workplace Client and Server programming model, and public APIs. He co-led the Java Portlet Specification V 1.0 (JSR 168) and is now leading the V 2.0 (JSR 286). Stefan also started the Pluto project at Apache that provides the reference implementation of JSR 168.

Join me in congratulating the runners-up and expect more exciting projects to come from them in the months ahead. If you missed my column last month you can check it out at http://java.sys-con.com/read/232104.htm, and meet the winners of the 4th JCP Program Annual Awards.