[ANN] Ruby Central 2005 Codefest Grant recipients

ruby-talk
1

Dear Rubyists,

We are pleased to announce that five codefest grants will be awarded
this year, in the first Ruby Central Codefest Grant Program.

Below (in no particular order) are the titles of the five projects,
together with the name of the applicant and some excerpts from the
applicant's description of the project. Thanks and congratulations to
the grant recipients. We're looking forward to seeing the results!

David Black
Chad Fowler
Rich Kilmer
for Ruby Central, Inc.

Codefest Grant recipients:

1. Ruby Displaytag (Dave Tiu)

A port to Ruby/Rails of a popular Java/Struts library for displaying
and interacting with HTML table presentations.

2. Ruby/AGG and Ruby/View (Andrey Melnik)

This will be a wrapper library for AGG (http://antigrain.com) allowing
users to draw high-quality graphics. Later this will be a base for
Ruby-centric GUI toolkit similar to Rebol/view which is also based on
AGG

3. Gambit (James Edward Gray II)

Gambit is pure Ruby framework for building multiplayer Web games
offering two key services: Game management and design tools. Gambit
can manage player's accounts, game hosting and joining, player
histories, in-game communication systems and out-of-game notifications
for in-game activities.

4. Ruby Bindings to Lucene Search Engine (Brian McCallister)

Provide Ruby bindings to the Lucene (http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/)
search engine via SWIG and GCJ.

5. RubyGems cleanup and enhancement (Ryan Davis)

Rubygems is a very powerful system for ruby package management but is
still rather rough around the edges. Getting rubygems well-polished
will make it more widely accepted and increase the chance of getting
it included in the standard ruby library. This would be a huge benefit
to both users and developers.

2

And a belated thanks (my fault) to the judges, for their time and
effort in evaluating the applications.

David

···

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, David A. Black wrote:

Below (in no particular order) are the titles of the five projects,
together with the name of the applicant and some excerpts from the
applicant's description of the project. Thanks and congratulations to
the grant recipients. We're looking forward to seeing the results!

--
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net

3

David A. Blackwrote:

Dear Rubyists,

We are pleased to announce that five codefest grants will be awarded
this year, in the first Ruby Central Codefest Grant Program.

Below (in no particular order) are the titles of the five projects,
together with the name of the applicant and some excerpts from the
applicant's description of the project. Thanks and congratulations to
the grant recipients. We're looking forward to seeing the results!

This is a great list of enhancements for Ruby!

I hope that the success of this effort inspires people (who are in the
position to do so) to make donations to support future code grants!

[snip]

2. Ruby/AGG and Ruby/View (Andrey Melnik)

This will be a wrapper library for AGG (http://antigrain.com) allowing
users to draw high-quality graphics. Later this will be a base for
Ruby-centric GUI toolkit similar to Rebol/view which is also based on
AGG

I hope that this is built and released without the optional General Polygon
Clipper (so that it can be used in both commercial and open source
software).

Curt

4

Yes, a little on and off the radar. My partner, Greg Brown, and I were informed we had a better shot at the grant if we didn't do too much work upfront (to create a need). :wink:

Officially, we've committed a few files to CVS which your are welcome to pull down and look over. The main point of interest here is the project README, which outlines our vision. (This is pretty much our grant application.)

There are also a couple of unit tests I recently committed. Interestingly, these grew out of ideas I had while running/solving the Yahtzee Ruby Quiz. We're using the tests to play with interface. When we find what we like, we'll build it until they pass. This is our pre-codefest planning strategy, so expect to see this set grow in the near future.

Unofficially, we've been doing research and planning. One of our big goals with the project is to support commercial game sites as best we can. (Yes, we will support open source sites as well.) Our README contains links to successful commercial game sites we've looked into. We're looking at how they work and what they need, so we can ease development and management for similar operations.

As I said, we've also been planning. This mostly concerns our build strategy. We're going to start by throwing together some game tools, probably using them to build simple command-line games. From there, we'll mix in views for each component and develop a layout system that can be used to design each game related Web page. We put these in trivial servlets, so we can watch our progress. Then we will tackle wrapping that in a game hosting management infrastructure. Throughout our process, we want to test with actual games, or our slight variations of such. We have already selected a few favorites, one definitely non-trivial. We want to ensure the system's usefulness for real work.

Basically, we're taking the project seriously, hoping to produce a useful tool. It's not all fun and games. :wink:

That's where we are at this point. We've just begun discussing dates for the actual codefest, but it will be sometime this summer.

We're very excited about the project and are glad to see that others are too. We want to thank Ruby Central for our selection and the whole grant process.

If I can answer anymore questions, please don't hesitate to email me (off-list is fine). Thanks for the interest!

James Edward Gray II

···

On Mar 8, 2005, at 8:23 PM, Shashank Date wrote:

3. Gambit (James Edward Gray II)
Gambit is pure Ruby framework for building multiplayer Web games
offering two key services: Game management and design tools. Gambit
can manage player's accounts, game hosting and joining, player
histories, in-game communication systems and out-of-game notifications
for in-game activities.

I am very interested in learning about this project ... James, has there
  been any activity since its hosting on Rubyforge?