Strut Your Stuff: The OpenSpaces Developer Challenge

I am very excited and pleased to say that today we’ve finally launched the OpenSpaces Developer Challenge. This is essentially a developer competition that invites everyone to submit their projects to the open source OpenSpaces initiative from GigaSpaces. And there are $25,000 in prizes, including a $10,000 first prize. We’re no Google (yet), but still, this is real money.
Why have a developer competition?
The quote from Nati, in our official announcement of the competition says it all:

“We’ve made a huge investment in OpenSpaces internally at GigaSpaces, but
we recognize that we have only scratched the surface of its potential,”
said Nati Shalom, GigaSpaces chief technology officer and founder. “With
this Challenge, we are inviting the developer community to show us what
we’re missing, while contributing to the community at-large. Developers
will have the added bonus of possibly earning some prizes in the process.”

The GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform is a broad product with wide applicability. It can be used to implement scale-out architectures with high-performance in a wide variety of use cases ranging from algorithmic trading on Wall Street to social networking applications and search engines. Over time, we received many requests from customers, partners and others to extend the product capabilities in various ways — many more than we could possibly do in a timely manner internally. We’ve also seen it being used as an application platform in ways we never thought of. So we decided to take our flagship API, which is based on the Spring Framework, and open source it. We called it OpenSpaces. Now others can contribute and extend the product.
To give you some sense of possible projects — applications and plug-ins — see the current projects already in the works. It is an extremely diverse list with projects ranging from PHP and REST APIs to an Oil & Gas exploration application using Microsoft Excel.
The competition is one more step in encouraging the community to participate in this exciting initiative. Some of the participants have already told us that they plan on taking their submissions and actually building a business around them. It was particularly appealing to them with our Start-Up Program offering.
I also want to take this opportunity to thank the distinguished group that has agreed to act as judges in the competition, including: