Three stand-out projects recognized for their innovation and synergy with GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP)
New York, N.Y. – June 19, 2008 – GigaSpaces Technologies today announced the winner of the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge, which awards $25,000 in prizes to developers who build the most unique and innovative applications or plug-ins for the OpenSpaces Framework. Leonardo Goncalves with Goods Donation System (GoDo) won the $10,000 grand prize for a distributed application that electronically unites those willing to donate goods with those interested in receiving a donation. All three finalists created innovative projects leveraging GigaSpaces XAP.
Goncalves’ application was selected for its innovative approach to encourage social responsibility through a fast, reliable and highly scalable means of exchanging information using OpenSpaces. Goncalves created a way to employ Java Script Object Notation (JSON) to serialize objects into and out of the GigaSpaces platform’s in-memory data grid.
The second and third place winners, who received $2,500 and $1,000 in prizes respectively, are:
o Kirill Ishanov with Gigapult: Gigapult is an open source tool that simplifies configuration of distributed applications including environment variables, cluster configuration and JVM options. It does so using a JRuby-based domain specific language (DSL). Gigapult has already been used in production environments and is licensed under Apache 2.0.
o Jason Carreira with DomainProxy: Carreira’s project allows Java Persistence (JPA) application programming interface (API) to run on the GigaSpaces platform. As JPA is becoming the de facto standard for object/relational persistence in Java, migrating to GigaSpaces as a data platform proves seamless. DomainProxy is open source and licensed under Apache 2.0.
“With the inventive, high quality entries we received, this Challenge was a pleasure to judge. The projects of the three finalists stood out for the way they each solved a real problem and presented a unique, cutting-edge concept,” said John Davies, Co-founder and CTO, Incept5 and OpenSpaces Developer Challenge judge. “GigaSpaces’ efforts, such as this contest, to encourage innovation within the developer community, are a great way to support creativity in the industry.”
The Challenge began in December to encourage developers to write applications, plug-ins, or extensions that meet today’s market demand for scalability, reliability and high performance. After presentations of each project and thorough code reviews, judges used the following criteria in their selections: synergy with GigaSpaces XAP; creativity and elegance; completeness in solving a specific problem; code quality and documentation; and project usefulness to the target audience. The grand prize winner and finalists were formally announced at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Prague on June 18th.
“Our goal with this contest was to stimulate innovation around the OpenSpaces framework and to support and contribute to the developer community,” said Nati Shalom, founder and CTO, GigaSpaces. “We are absolutely thrilled with the results and the caliber of projects submitted. The pioneering efforts of the developers who submitted have greatly expanded the uses of OpenSpaces and the problems it can solve.”
Contest entries ranged from grid setup utilities, to monitoring tools, implementations of popular APIs and full scale applications. Projects also spanned frameworks such as Grizzly and memcached, and dynamic languages including JRuby, Groovy and PHP.
The OpenSpaces development framework was designed to simply and dynamically scale applications across virtual and distributed environments, such as cloud computing, grids and commodity server farms. It is unique in that it addresses applications that have been traditionally difficult to distribute in this manner, including high-throughput applications that are stateful, transactional or data-intensive – common requirements in Web 2.0, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and enterprise applications. OpenSpaces leverages GigaSpaces XAP as the middleware implementation, and is based on the popular Spring Framework.
The expert panel of judges included Adrian Coyler, CTO, SpringSource; Joe Ottinger, editor, TheServerSide.com; John Davies, Co-founder and CTO, Incept5; Julian Brown, architecture consultant, RWE; Keerat Sharma, platform engineer, Gallup; and Ross Mason, co-founder and CTO, MuleSource.
Due to the success of this year’s OpenSpaces Developer Challenge, GigaSpaces will be holding the contest again next year. More information on the 2008 contest and the winners is available at the OpenSpaces.org blog: http://www.openspaces.org/display/OS/2008/05/27/OpenSpaces+Developer+Challenge+WINNERS
About GigaSpaces
GigaSpaces Technologies is a leading provider of a scale-out application server for Java, .Net and C++ environments. The GigaSpaces middleware is a single product that handles data, business logic and messaging – and utilizes industry-standard APIs and an open source stack to provide a complete application infrastructure solution. With GigaSpaces, applications can be easily built for scalability, reliability and high-performance in distributed environments, such as SOA, clusters, grids and cloud computing.
GigaSpaces’ customers include leading organizations in financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and the Internet, where the need for mission-critical high-performance, reliability and scalability necessitates an alternative to traditional approaches. GigaSpaces was founded in 2000 and has offices worldwide. For more information visit: http://www.gigaspaces.com