XPages Development Contest: A Review
This monday OpenNTF announced the winners of the “XPages Development Contest” sponsored by We4IT. The winners are:
- Ferry Kranenburg for his Multi Database Search Control
- Dennis Chen for his ZK Spreadsheet for XPages
- Rami Muurimaki for his XPages PDF Exporter Custom Control
Congratulations to all of you and enjoy your iPads!
I reckon the contest can be regarded as a big success. I enjoyed a nice night before the contest started on which Niklas told me about the contest and what he expected from it. He said that if 10 controls will be submitted the contest is a big success. Well let’s check the numbers: We have 54 custom controls and 10 library controls. That’s 64 controls! That is 6.5 times more than expected. I assumes that Niklas spread numbers that were agreed on in the steering committee. So to OpenNTF: Congratulations as well!
Now, let’s talk about the controls themselves. 64 controls are awesome, but what kind of controls are we talking about? There were all kinds of controls! We have very simple ones like the Daily Dilbert Control by Ulrich Krause or the Stop Watch Control by Rolf Kremer just to name two. On the other hand there are very sophisticated controls like the three winners or the Select Database Control by Lars Buntrock and the View PickList Control by Mark Hughes. There are many more so please do not blame me if you are not mentioned here.
Now that the contest is over and the winners have been named I think the goal of the contest has been too broad. The variety of the controls is so big that comparison between the controls is not possible in all cases. The next contest should have a challenge more narrow like “Provide custom controls which implement Lotus Notes functions” or “Provide custom controls which implemet interfaces to Third Party products”. It has to be narrowed down to make it more compareable and judgeable.
Anyway, I personally expected Mark Hughes’ View PickList Control among the last three. Why? Because it has an immediate business impact and everybody needs it. But don’t get me wrong: I do not want to kick one of the winners from the podium, the y definitely deserved to win. It’s just that if I had the chance to vote Mark would have definitely got an iPad.
So, after the contest is before the contest, isn’t it? The community is the biggest winner anyway and benefits from all those controls handed in. So please let many more contests follow.
It was a really hard decision for the Steering Committee. I think the view picklist control is indeed really valuable as well as for example the Java charts controls, the involve control and the select database control to only name a few. I love contests, but the ‘problem’ is that not everyone can win.
As for your comment ‘too broad’ stay tuned.
I know that it was a hard decision and I did not want to say that it is wrong at all. I just wanted to point out that I had a personal favorite. Other people had other favorites which is fair enough and as I said: The community and OpenNTF are the biggest winners anyway.
I agree that the picklist control is really great, my personal favourite.
Glad that I wasn’t a member of the jury, I can imagine (or can I?) how hard it were to decide which one is “better” than the other.
First I was planning to create a control based on the JFreeChart OS Java library but the idea was already “taken” so I had to figure something else out
OpenNTF really was the actual winner.
Thanks everyone for the kind words, and Rami i will be using your control for sure in the near future, glad the other one you wanted to do was taken, so you did that one instead, it seemed to work out well for you
“Provide custom controls which implement Lotus Notes functions”
right on.