Django Dash 2012 Round-Up

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.

Keywords  /  Home

• python,
• django,
• django dash