August 21, 2012 / Home

The Django Dash for 2012 is now over, and once again it was a ton of fun! The Dash is a 48 hour coding competition for teams of up to three, competing to see who can build the best Django application over a weekend. To top it off, all of the entries are made available as open source.

This year I went solo for the first time, which made it quite gruelling as I had to handle everything from back-end code, interface development, and visual design. I decided to follow the same recipe as our 3rd place entry from last year, Drawn By, specifically by creating an environment where people can come together and interact in real-time using WebSockets. I named my entry GAMBLOR — it’s an online casino where people can move around and chat with each other, while playing casino games with fake money. Check out GAMBLOR as well as the source code if you’re interested, and you can see the game plugin system I built to power the initial games implemented: roulette and craps.

Apart from the staples of Django and jQuery, here are some of the components I used that made GAMBLOR possible in such a short amount of time:

gevent-socketio — Provides the Python implementation of socket.io, allowing real-time activity to occur in the browser using WebSockets.

Redis — A NoSQL database, similar to memcached but with richer data structures.

CSS3 — The design was implemented almost entirely without graphics, using many CSS3 features such as shadows, background gradients, and even 3D transforms for the gaming chips.

jquery-transit — A library for advanced JavaScript animations, which powered the roulette wheel rotation.

jquery-collision — Provides collision detection for browser objects, which allowed for avatar movement to be constrained within the game area and around the game tables.

I’ve put together a table below that lists all of the final entries, with links to their sites and source code. I left out any entries that didn’t contain a working site, or didn’t seem to function. If I’ve missed any or you have any other corrections, please let me know.

It’s interesting to look at some of the recurring themes present within all of the entries. There were multiple entries that fell under each of the following ideas:

Cloud server management — Cloud Fish, Gungnir

GitHub mashups — Badger, Heroes of Git & Hub, Mosaic, Try Box

Tutorial/class creation — Django Tutorial, Try Box, Try Try, Tutor Us

Photo mashups — Gif Feed, Green Room, Lemidora, Miracles Live, The Busitizer

Portfolio generation — Folio Bag, Mosaic

Map mashups — Kirchenreich, Quester

My definite favourites are Heroes of Git & Hub, which lets you battle your open source projects against others in a D&D style game, and The Busitizer which I’ll just leave for you to check out for yourself.

Title Description Team Size API Tester Automated tests for APIs 3 Site Source Badger Get badges for open source 3 Site Source Black Hole Mail web-app 3 Site Source Cloud Fish Cloud server manager 3 Site Source Comminator Hacker News clone 1 Site Source Crowd Photo Crowd sourcing photos 2 Site Source Django Gallery App store for photos 1 Site Source Django Tutorial Interactive Django tutorial 3 Site Source Folio Bag Portfolio generator 1 Site Source Folivora Dependency manager 3 Site Source GAMBLOR Real-time multi-user casino 1 Site Source Gif Feed Collection of Gifs 1 Site Source Green Room Dressing room opinion app 3 Site Source Gungnir Cloud server manager 3 Site Source Heroes of Git & Hub Battles of GitHub projects 2 Site Source Ipse Dixit Collection of quotes 3 Site Source Kirchenreich Maps mashup for churches 3 Site Source Lemidora Photo sharing 3 Site Source Lictor Stack trace visualizer 3 Site Source Like I'm 5ive Dictionary / wiki tool 3 Site Source Miracles Live Instagram/Flickr mashup of world wonders 3 Site Source Mosaic Open source project portfolio generator 2 Site Source Old Mail Group email collboration 3 Site Source Pelican Migrator Migrate blogs to Pelican 3 Site Source Project Starter Landing page generator 2 Site Source Promisely Collection of promises 3 Site Source Publican Business ledger app 1 Site Source Quester Create quest games on a world map 3 Site Source Red Check Spell checker for websites 3 Site Source Slug.in Custom URL shortener 3 Site Source Tamli Social bookmarking 1 Site Source The Busitizer Add Gary Busey to Facebook photos 3 Site Source The Hack Box Hackathon manager 3 Site Source Try Box Online IDE for programming tutorials 3 Site Source Try Try Interactive programming tutorials 2 Site Source Tutor Us Create & run online classes 3 Site Source Wikipedia Analytics Create charts from Wikipedia data 2 Site Source

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