Waldo Smeets .com

This second part of the week I am at the Initiatives event in Liege, Belgium. We organized a Build a Rich Internet Application Contest and all participants are working very very hard on their RIA right now.

It really is interesting to see how different teams are approaching the same problem in different ways. The subject of the competition is www.celem.be and the participants have to build a Rich Internet Application for this site. I already looked at some drafts together with the owner of the website, and we really were very enthousiastic about them. We see lots of ways in which the participants are trying to improve the user experience and to lower maintenance cost: some people are using animation, others sound, others try to use as much components as possible, some go for the same color set and others choose a complete new one, some use Loadvars whilst other use Flash Remoting, etc etc.

Tomorrow will be the last day that they can work on their demo (they then have had 10 hours to prepare it) and we will ask all of them to give a small presentation on their work and their vision. I will try to put all the demos and of course the ‘before’ website online somewhere, and maybe even make a case study for the winning demo if it’s good enough to be implemented in the real world. So if you are interested in the process the participants went through, you should defenitely check back soon. I will be posting any news on this competition as soon as possible.