Since the end of last November, we’ve been sifting through the many impressive submissions for Typesafe’s Developer Contest. As you may recall, we encouraged the community to submit sample applications that demonstrate the power and functionality of Typesafe technologies. Martin Odersky kindly pledged his JAX Java Ambassador Award as prize money, with $1000, $500 and $200 for the first, second and five third place entries, respectively.
We received well over 70 submissions for the contest, ranging from an SMS application, a push notification tool for mobile devices, a social network monitoring framework to a race car app! The submissions were as varied and interesting as they were sophisticated; it was so cool to see what folks were able to pull together with Scala, Akka and Play in such a short period of time! Needless to say, the judges were impressed.
Martin, Jonas Bonér, Viktor Klang, Peter Hausel, Josh Suereth and guest judge Rod Johnson reviewed each submission and selected the winners. Here are the results:
Drum roll, please...
1st: Distributed Akka Whiteboard
Brian Degenhardt designed a beautifully simple distributed Akka application. While the application looks clean and effortless, it’s functionality is very sophisticated and demonstrates the use of Akka in Play. The whiteboard is written in Scala and illustrates the versatility of Actors (in this case, an iPhone client talking to an Akka server) in about 200 LOC.
The whiteboard is so simple and elegant - we were very impressed by Brian’s programming skills; he really took note of the specific scope of the competition, and for these reasons definitely deserves the first place slot. Congratulations, Brian!
2nd: Car Race Dashboard
Fabrice Croiseaux and Antoine Detante have designed an app that is simply awesome, and a very, very close runner up to Brian’s whiteboard. The application’s goal is to allow a user to follow a Formula 1 car race in real time.
The screen displays the following information:
- Position of all cars on a map
- Real time information such as speed, rank, current lap, car damage and others
- Computed statistics like average speed, total distance, best lap
This app is far more than just a sample, and even has real world applicability! The Car Race Dashboard features great animation of real world grand prix races; and the judges were truly wowed!
3rd: Scalajobz
Ruchi Jindal’s app is another great application and adds significant value to the Scala community as it advertises jobs! Well written, with a nice user interface.
3rd: Backgammon
It’s Backgammon! William Billingsley’s application has great graphics and allows two people to play Backgammon via a browser interface. Very slick.
3rd: Home Library
Lukas Sembera submitted a genuinely useful book cataloging application that could be repurposed to catalog literally anything. Definitely an application that everyone would find useful, and it’s a well written to boot!
3rd: MBTiles Streaming
Yevgeniy Borshch has written an excellent sample that demonstrates map integration.
3rd: Event Based Task Runner
Vibul Imtarnasan wrote an event based task runner using Scala and Akka, demonstrating Camel integration that can be used to poll or wait for events which will trigger the execution of configured tasks/services. This is a great sample that I’m sure many people will utilize.
Thanks to all who submitted, we were truly blown away by the tremendous amount of creativity and thought that went into this contest. The judges felt that that Brian Degenhardt’s Distributed Whiteboard was ultimately the winner due to it’s beautiful simplicity and clear demonstration of the power of Scala and Akka. We’ll be sending out Typesafe t-shirts to all participants soon!
by Hywel Evans, Solutions Architect at Typesafe
