This is a guest post by Fa Hua Jin (known as Rocky) of the IBM China Development Lab.
An awards ceremony for 2012 IBM Rational EGL contest was held on August 24, 2012, at the IBM Software Technical Summit in Beijing, China. After half a year’s hard work, six teams were awarded prizes. There was strong competition from 104 registered teams at Chinese universities and academies.
IBM Fellow Kevin Stoodley issued the 1st prize award at the ceremony
EGL is a business programming language provided by IBM. Many enterprises and organizations around the world choose EGL as the programming language to develop their most important core applications. To promote the EGL language, and also to attract more developers from communities, IBM started the EGL open strategy in 2008. In December 2011, the open version of EGL, EDT 0.7 (EGL Development Tools), was released. EDT is open source, based on Eclipse. Anybody can use EDT for free, and engage in EDT’s development and testing under the Eclipse open source license.
To promote EGL in China, and make the Chinese development community more aware of it, IBM China Development Lab launched the EGL contest in March, 2012. Its target audience was students in universities and academies in mainland China. After the contest started, lots of students from all over China actively joined the event. By the end of May, 104 teams from 35 universities and academies in China had registered for the contest. The various and innovative topics chosen by students covered interesting topics and issues. This demonstrates the wide vision and interests of the students, and it also shows the many strong capabilities of EGL.
The submitted works mostly covered the following themes.
- Extend the language by leveraging the extensibility of EGL.
- Interesting applications for smart hand-held devices. For example, a campus management system, network collaboration drawing, computer remote control, meal-ordering system, etc.
- Web 2.0-based applications, for things such as social networking, a food safety information release platform, etc.
The committee awarded prizes to the following six works.
First Prize
Name: Extend EGL to Support Google Application Engine Datastore
Author: Ying Zhong Xu
From: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, North China
Description: Extend the abstract I/O statements of EGL to support the BigTable implementation of Google App Engine. The work perfectly demonstrated EGL‘s extensibility – if a 3rd party writes a new I/O implementation in EGL, existing EGL applications can be seamlessly migrated to the new system. In this sample, an EGL program which accesses a database could be deployed to Google App engine without making too many changes.
Second Prizes
Work 1
Name: I Love Playing
Author: Mao De Shi, Gui Ju Zhang
From: Hunan University, Changsha, Central China
Description: This SNS-based application developed in EGL uses web 2.0 technologies. Users can use this application to organize and join activities. The application covers the major functions of SNS applications. It also leverages various 3rd party services. For example, the MSN account service, the location service provided by Sohu.com, and weather service provided by Google. Authors also took advantage of EGL extensibility and encapsulated the JQuery widgets. The application’s UI is clean and beautiful; it’s also easy to use.
Propose activity
Work 2
Name: Click
Author: Dao Shu Wang, Xiao Lin Hou, Tie Xin Gao
From: Peking University, Beijing, North China
Description: An EGL mobile application. The application can be used for controlling a remote computer with a smart phone. The authors fully took advantage of EGL’s capabilities, extending EGL to support interaction with local native OS functionalities. This is an innovative idea, with clean, beautiful user interfaces.
Use mobile to control computer
Third Prizes
Work 1
Name: Food Safety Information Release System
Author: Xiaobin He, Zhen Ming Shen, Chao Wang
From: Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong, South China
Description: The food safety release and management system is based on EGL web 2.0 technologies. The authors hope to establish a communication platform between government and public consumers, which would help to resolve food safety problems. Food safety authorities would publish food safety news and random-sampling inspection results, and the public could file complaints against certain brands. Authorities would handle the complaints and then reply to consumers in the system. The application UI is simplified with full functionality. The authors are proficient with EGL web 2.0 development technologies. They also provided a professional development process and detailed documentation. The judges were very impressed with their use of software lifecycle management tools.
Food safety information release and management system
Work 2
Name: What Should I Eat?
Author: Li Zhang, Lin Lu
From: Xiamen University, Xiamen, Southeast China
Description: An EGL mobile application, helping to solve the problem of deciding what to eat. The user can specify the price range and other preferences, and then the system will automatically propose food and restaurants. The authors fully leveraged the EGL mobile functionalities, and gave the EGL development team some suggestions.
What Should I Eat?
Work 3
Name: Who Am I?
Author: Jun Yu Chen
From: Sichuan University, Chengdu, Southwest China
Description: EGL Web 2.0-based application for self test. The system provides several tests to help people better understand themselves; also it provides the ability to dynamically add new tests. The UI layout is clean, with full functionality, and it is easy to use.
Who Am I?
