Congrats to Sten Anderson, JavaFX Coding Challenge Winner

Our consultants' passion for technology and commitment to innovation is amazing.  I received a call from Sten Anderson last Friday evening informing me that he won the worldwide JavaFX Coding Challenge sponsored by Sun Microsystems with his Music Explorer FX rich internet application (RIA). I was thrilled to hear this news.  Wow, first Music Explorer FX shows up on the Java App Store unveiling on stage at a JavaOne keynote, now it places first in a worldwide coding contest bringing $25,000 in prize money.  Congratulations Sten!

Music Explorer FX is a visual tool for discovering new music. Start with your favorite artist and take a "musical journey" based on recommendations provided by the Echo Nest. Up to six recommendations will be given for each artist so no two journeys will be the same. As you take your journey, you can listen to music from the artist, view images of the artist, and follow links to view videos, Twitter feeds, reviews, news, and blogs. At any point you can automatically tweet your journey if you discover a path that you particularly enjoy.

What some of you may or may not know is that the Music Explorer FX is something Sten decided to create in his "free" time, in between projects with our clients and personal time.  This makes the achievement of winning this coding challenge even sweeter.  As you can see from the last interview with his daughter, Meredith, Sten's main reason for writing the Music Explorer FX was to have an interesting project in which he could test and further his knowledge of the JavaFX platform and RIA development in general.

Aside of the "cool" factor and the shear joy of browsing through recommendations that are similar to my favorite artists, I am excited about the how internet based applications are becoming much more user friendly and intuitive by leveraging rich internet application platforms such as JavaFX.  Sure, someone could have easily wrote a web browser based application that interfaced with the Echo Nest API presenting artist recommendations in a standard, sortable data grid.  However, as the user of the application, would you have felt like you took a "musical journey" or a lifeless series of clicks?

You might ask:  So, what does this have to do with enterprise application development, a core competency of CITYTECH?   Applications with an innovative and compelling user interface such as the Music Explorer FX can help us think differently about how to convey important business events and data to our users.  If you were an air traffic controller and you had your choice of seeing aircraft positions in scrollable data grid or visually overlaying a map of the airport's runways, which would be more useful?