Last week we had another Vaadin related code camp. This time at the Swedish speaking Åbo Akademi University, here in our home city of Turku, Finland.
During a one-week-course, the students got a short one-day introduction to Vaadin and related Java web tools like Eclipse and Tomcat, after which they were off to create any kind of web application they could think of.
On Friday we summarized the projects and shared the experiences and code. Having seen several similar code camp courses, this one was one of the best. The students were really taking their time and effort to build good and useful web applications. Furthermore, all the project presentations were really well prepared, even though there was less than one week time to finish the applications and prepare the presentation.
We promised to give the best project a small prize and selecting the winning group wasn't at all easy to decide. There were some very good ideas, for example a lunch menu browser, an online Latex editor, a chat application, a hotel reservation system and a golf scoring tracker.
There were a total of 11 projects completed during the week.
We finally decided to award the winning prize to the guys who made the chat application. Along with normal features expected of a chat application, it introduced a new way of sharing videos and images right from the chat window. However, we especially liked the completeness of this application.
Deploying the applications for public use was not part of the course, but at least some of them will be available later on.
We hope the students enjoyed this alternative way of learning as much we enjoyed to see how great ideas got implemented.