Lost connection doesn’t dampen appetites at WOW Iron Chef
By April Karys, The Comdex Daily
What if the Food Network’s Iron Chef went on live TV and the gas supply to the stoves went down? Chances are, they’d start thinking about borscht, ceviche, or sushi. The equivalent happened Tuesday on the show floor when the Internet connection at the WOW Second Annual Iron Chef of Web Services competition was irretrievably lost. But the contestants were cooking with gas anyway.
"It’s representative of what happens in the real world," said Bill Cullifer, executive director of the World Organization of Webmasters. "On occasion, technology lets us down. But in the real world, we find workarounds."
And that’s just what the contestants did. Rather than quit the contest and abandon the intensive preparation they’d undertaken, the teams got together with the judges to develop a list of rules to govern the creation and judging of the Web services applications they’d build in just three hours, using Web services selected randomly by WOW. After this unusual and time-consuming step, they gathered their tools and ingredients, and got down to developing.
"This contest is positioned as edutainment, but it’s also very serious," Cullifer said. "A lot of people put in a lot of time and have traveled a long way to compete."
WOW Iron Chef of Web Services is a programmer showcase in which teams use published Web services and commercially available software to build a Web services application. WOW randomly chooses five Web services from a list of more than 40. The teams must use three to five of those services. Just as with the Iron Chef television show, a theme "ingredient" is chosen and used as the starting point for measuring the success of the application each team develops. This year’s theme ingredient was existing Web services.
WOW Iron Chef demonstrates that "anybody can do what we’re doing," said Anthony Fedan, tech editor with ComputerEdge. "In other words, it’s like pool. Everybody can get a pool stick, but it’s not the pool stick that determines how well they play the game. It’s the player. A simple tool in the right hands can be used to create anything you want." As the teams sweated it out, observers circulated from the show floor, anticipating the demonstration phase.
"I’m looking at these guys to see what they can write," said David Hoffman, president of Networks Connect, Inc. of Tampa, Fla. "And I’m kind of comparing my programmers to these guys."
The creations
Grand Central Communications of San Francisco, working with Dreamfactory of Los Gatos, Calif., demonstrated a service that would allow horror novelist Stephen King to track his book rankings on various e-commerce sites (such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon) and also follow his stock portfolio. The service monitors activity in either sector, ensures correct data is being delivered to correct services, tracks events of concern, and sends alerts by e-mail or fax whenever necessary.
Team members:
Byrne Reese, Director of Product Management for Grand Central
Bill Appleton, Founder of Dreamfactory
Universal Data Interface Corp. (UDI) of New York demonstrated TierBroker, a self-contained solution for building Web services applications. The demonstrated Web service application allows brokers to track stocks, monitor and test server functions, send alerts as necessary, and monitor data and transfer it to spreadsheets and other display media.
Team member:
Adam Griessman, CEO
Computer Associates demonstrated Unicenter WSDM, a Web service application based on Java and a .Net client that individuals in the publishing field could use to track author contact information as well as to monitor book sales for each author.
Team members:
Igor Sedukhin, Assistant VP of Development
Charles Connelly, Senior Software Engineer
And the winners were:
First place: Team Grand Central
Second Place: Team Computer Associates
Third Place: Team UDI.
Judges were:
Mark Ehr, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates
Roberta Bragg, Contributing Editor, Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine
Sidney Hill, Jr., Executive Editor, MSI
Anthony Fedan, Technology Editor, Computeredge
Brent Norris, President, Aloha Designs
Cia Romano, CEO and Founder, Interface Guru