Date Published: 2004-01-17

The First Annual WebGUI Perl Programming is over, the votes have been tallied, and the winners chosen. Before we get into the details, we'd like to thank the participants for putting in the effort to make WebGUI a better system and the WebGUI Community stronger.

The goal of this area was to create a new WebGUI pluggable application component (aka a wobject).

Both our ratings and the community's ratings are a match in this category for the top three entries, but the Shopping Cart wobject is the clear winner. All three of the top entries had excellent code, templates, and instructions. We feel that these three are also of great use to the community as a whole, and don't be surprised if you see them in an upcoming WebGUI release.

Though the Simple Search wobject did not win the contest, it was well executed and we learned a few things from the author. We intend to enhance our own internal search mechanism based upon the techniques used in it.

The Listings wobject was incredibly creative, but lost points for elegance. Wobjects should be self-contained, and this wobject modified the WebGUI core. In addition, the category editor crashed when we tried to use it. This wobject also lost some points due to limited appeal in the utility category. It is useful only to a small subset of WebGUI users, but we can see how to those users it would be incredibly valuable. We encourage the author of this wobject to continue working on it, both to hone his skills and for the benefit of the community.

The grand prize winner of the wobjects contest is Andy Grundman for his Shopping Cart wobject. Because he was also voted number one by the community he'll be receiving a WebGUI t-shirt.

Because Len Kranendonk was voted number two by the community for his work on the Advanced Search wobject he'll also be receiving a WebGUI t-shirt.

And finally Len Kranendonk (Advanced Search), Ed Van Duinen (Task Manager), fishingfan (Listings), and Leendert Bottelberghs (Simple Search) will all be receiving a $100 discretionary prize for their hard work and creativity.

The goal of this category was to create a new navigation macro.

We got only three entries in this category. Our original thinking with this category was that people often voice their opinion that there should be more types of navigation in WebGUI. Seeing the limited number of submissions leads us to believe that we'll need to create a new category to replace this one for next year's contest.

We've awarded the grand prize to Patrick Weemeeuw for his work on the Next Page Link macro. It was easily the most creative since there is nothing like it in WebGUI. Patrick will also receive a WebGUI t-shirt for being voted second-place by the WebGUI community.

Daniel Collis Puro will receive a WebGUI t-shirt for his UL Flex Menu and Simple Vertical Menu macros, which were voted first and second place respectively. Since he cannot win the same prize twice, Daniel will concede his second t-shirt to Patrick.

Some entries are ranked 999 by the Plain Black staff. This is because they were disqualified from winning monetary prizes for being derivatives of existing WebGUI components, which is in violation of the rules.