The first annual CFDJ Readers' Choice Awards are filled with lots of surprises. Overall, they paint a clear picture of the industry and what you - the reader - like and dislike. Modeled after the extremely successful Java Developer's Journal awards (one of CFDJ's sister publications), the established model proved to work quite well here. (How could it not? The whole system runs off ColdFusion!) Awards are being presented at the Allaire Developer Conference, November 5-8, in Washington, DC. They are presented in 13 categories: Best Book, Best Consulting Service, Best Custom Tag, Best Database Tool, Best Design Service, Best e-Business Software, Best Education and Training, Best Testing Tool, Best Web Development Tool, Best Web Hosting, Best Web Site, Best Web Application, and Most Innovative CF Application. For full coverage of the awards ceremony, including photos of the presentation, please visit www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/.

Over 13,000 votes were logged - quite an impressive number, and many more than our initial estimates of the turnout. The number was cut down after our auditing process, however, as hundreds of duplicates and other bad votes were removed from the voting tables. Every vote went through an extensive auditing process - way too long and boring to get into here - and what we were left with was what I can confidently call the best set of results we could have hoped for. Knowing how closely companies were watching the voting process, the auditing was taken quite seriously, and every possible method was used to get a clean set of results. Throughout the contest, the leaders in several categories changed; some latecomers rose to the top, and a few companies even went out of business and asked to be removed! It was quite exciting for those following the awards day in and day out to watch the fluctuations in the live results. But enough of me rambling on about how great the results were - check them out yourself. (See page 48 for complete coverage including profiles of the winning companies.)

With this year's awards wrapped up, plans are already underway for next year's. The nominating process starts in a few months. If you have suggestions on how to improve the technical end or the user experience, please drop me a line at Robert@sys-con.com; we're always looking for new ideas and suggestions. Also, if you believe any categories were overlooked, let us know and we'll look into adding them. We've already got several new and exciting ideas of our own.

For those of you using XML along with ColdFusion on your development projects, I invite you to take a look at our first Readers' Choice Awards for XML-Journal. You can access those at http://www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/article.cfm?id=274. By the time you read this, the awards will already be underway. While visiting www.xml-journal.com, you can also register for free access to the XML archives, a great resource for those working in or learning XML.

Till next month?