Worldwide contest strived to make Java applets accessible
“Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?” That was a question asked often last September when several of us in Sun’s education marketing unit first took up the idea of organizing a worldwide Java development contest. We knew we were breaking some new (cyber)ground, to say the least, since we would be the first ever to plan a worldwide contest conducted completely on the Internet.
We designed the contest to foster excitement about Java and to help get more quality Java applets into the public domain quickly. The project would just require being quick studies in contest planning — and lots of other subjects, as we found out.
For purposes of the contest, our goal of getting applets into the public domain meant requiring authors to give up intellectual property rights to their submissions. This was a tough choice for many potential entrants. We were pleased with the number of submissions received — 360 in all, from 41 countries — and especially with the quality of applets. We’re confident the number would have been much higher if entrants retained intellectual property rights.
Another challenge we encountered was dealing with the varying legal requirements for hosting a contest in multiple countries. With our regrets to all the talented software programmers in Italy, we decided against holding the contest there, since it would have legally required us to pay an upfront tax of one-third the total prize amount. (Sun awarded more than million in hardware and software overall to the winners, which means the tax would have been simply too many lira!)
We also had to enforce a minimum-age requirement for entering — which regrettably kept out contestants such as an ambitious 12-year-old Canadian. For purposes of the contest, entrants needed to confirm and send back an online contract agreeing to the rules of the contest. One must be at least 18 to contract legally in most countries, preventing us from allowing our Canadian friend from entering. But we want to keep in touch with him — maybe he’s the next James Gosling or Bill Joy!
Hearing the stories of the 19 winners, all of whom attended the JavaOne Developer’s Conference in San Francisco to receive their awards, was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the contest and a reward for all of our hard work. Members of the winning team for the Productivity Category, employees of Vasco Data Security and TriNet Services Inc., were virtual teammates up until their meeting at the JavaOne Conference. They had successfully collaborated on a winning applet, but never met in person until the day of the awards ceremony.
Many of us who spend time driving to work can appreciate the Java work done by Kelly Liu, who won in the Unlimited Category for her Traffic Simulation applet. Kelly’s applet uses Java’s multithreaded feature to simultaneously represent cars, traffic flow volume, and lights, and to predict and broadcast short- and long-term traffic status. Kelly had real-world motivation for designing her Java applet: shaving time off her daily commute to MathWorks in downtown Boston.
More than half of the applets entered came from the academic community, and about 70 percent of the entries were received during the last two days of the contest. This made for some busy last few weeks for our team of 50 technical judges, spread out over 15 different countries including Brazil, Canada, Chili, China, Dubai, Germany, Holland, Japan, Singapore, Sweden, the UK, and the U.S. An online scoring system called JAWS (Java Applet Web Scoring) was used by our technical team for this phase of the judging. The technical-judging Web site combined the Java language, HTML, HTTP, Perl, electronic mail, and database technologies that allowed for worldwide coordination among the judges.
Working steadily throughout the month of April, our technical team narrowed the field to a total of 60 finalists. Finalist applets were then scrutinized during a full-day of judging by our team of luminary judges, which included Marc Andreesen, vice president of technology and cofounder of Netscape; Alan Baratz, president of JavaSoft; Dr. James Gosling, vice president and fellow, Sun Microsystems; Daniel Hillis, fellow and vice president of research and development, Walt Disney Imagineering; Bill Joy, vice president, research, Sun Microsystems Laboratories; Andrew Laursen, formerly vice president, Network Computing Division, Oracle; Michael O’Connell, editor-in-chief, JavaWorld magazine; Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief technology officer, Sun Microsystems; and Larry Weber, vice president and general manager, SunSoft Developer Products Group.
With the one exception of print advertisements for the contest in Dr. Dobbs and a few other selected trade publications, we stuck to our goal of doing everything for the contest online, from publicizing about the contest, to registration of entrants, to recruiting and training technical and luminary judges, to showcasing the winning applets.
Winning applets can be viewed on the Java Cup International Web site, located at https://sunsite.utk.edu/winners_circle/, as well as at our SunSITE at the University of Tennessee, located at https://sunsite.utk.edu. We are currently working on adding all of the applets submitted for the contest to these sites.
