Alfresco Developer Guide is Potts’ first book, published in October last year. His book was judged best written out of a set of 6 nominated titles, including books about Drupal, Ext JS, JavaScript, and SOA.

"I am excited and honored to win the award," said Potts, "especially because I know there were several popular and well-written books among the finalists."

Judges praised the book for "providing a strong balance of background, actionable items, and wisdom" and bringing a complex, challenging topic "down to earth".

The winner receives a $1000 cash prize and an engraved Packt Author of the Year 2009 trophy.

Any Packt author who published a book in 2008 was eligible for the 2009 award. Six finalists were selected on the basis of an open vote, where readers could nominate their favorite eligible book. Packt then sent copies of these books to expert judges, who gave their opinions and evaluation of each title. The judges' verdict put the Alfresco Developer Guide on top.

Packt strives to be a rewarding publisher to work with, and a first choice for first time and veteran technical book authors.

"We’re pleased that this award gives us another chance to reward and thank our authors for their hard work," said David Barnes, Packt Acquisition Editor and organizer of the award. "We give our authors excellent royalty terms and all the assistance we can to help them with writing and then to market their work, so that the whole process is as rewarding as possible. Most of our authors write in their limited free time alongside demanding full time jobs and this award gives us another, more fun way to reward and thank our authors."

The Packt Author of the Year Award aims to acknowledge and reward authors whose books are written to an exceptional standard, provide the most practical and useful assistance to readers, and that enrich the tech community as a whole.

The other finalists for the award were:

Packt is always keen to attract new authors to write new tech books. Anybody interested in becoming a Packt author, and perhaps winning the award in a future year,should visit authors.packtpub.com and give Packt their details.

Catagay Civici has announced TouchFaces - a UI development kit enabling iPhone web applications to be created using JSF.

TouchFaces is a subproject of PrimeFaces which is a JSF toolkit providing many different UI components for JSF developers.

A video has been posted on Vimeo showing how to get started with TouchFaces.

A showcase of PrimeFaces can be seen here, whereas TouchFaces demo apps can be seen here.

The ‘smart’ PaaS runtime for Private Cloud based business systems.

Paremus, has announced the immediate availability of version 1.5 of the Paremus Service Fabric, the industry’s only OSGi-based Cloud runtime for the enterprise. At the heart of the 1.5 release is the new Nimble dependency engine, a state-of-the-art dependency resolver. Nimble enables the Paremus Service Fabric runtime to dynamically adapt to the requirements of the applications and business services it hosts. Driving inversion of control (IoC) to its logical conclusion, runtime policies attached to the application components enable the Service Fabric to dynamically deploy and manage all of the infrastructure services required by the business system.

“Cloud and OSGi are increasingly fashionable technologies, yet the market-hype obscures a number of fundamental operational problems that must be solved before Cloud based runtimes are ready to meet all the enterprise requirements.” said Richard Nicholson Paremus CEO. “The ability of a highly adaptive OSGi-based Cloud runtime to adapt to service requirements, as well as changing resource populations, is a fundamental differentiator of the Paremus Service Fabric. However, such capabilities must be balanced with the manageability, governance, and robustness considerations that all enterprises face. Paremus has focused on this problem area since 2003, and the 1.5 release of our second generation Service Fabric consolidates our technology leadership.”

“Take deployment of a simple WAR as an example” said Mike Francis, Sales & Marketing Director. “One business system may have a preference for the Jetty servlet container, while another may have a preference for Tomcat. At the point of deploying the WAR the Service Fabric understands that the WAR needs a Servlet container and dynamically installs the supporting infrastructure based on the defined policy associated with the application components. The net result is dramatic - an advanced composite Cloud runtime which is significantly simpler to manage than the current servers farms. The Service Fabric‘s adaptability also helps our customers avoid the expense and limitations of development framework and middleware lock-in.”

In addition to Nimble, the 1.5 release of the Service Fabric includes:

A free 30 day evaluation license of the Paremus Service Fabric is available following registration at http://www.paremus.com/registration/evaluation.html.