For those who are not aware of what API Hackathons are, I will try to break it down. Lets first look at the word “API”. An API (and here I am talking about it being publicly available) is some core functionality that a company exposes for its partners and the developer community to interact with from within their applications. A simple example is that of Twitter, which exposes an API to send a tweet from any application. A Hackathon is a gathering organized by one or more API providers, who would like their API to get used by interested developers in 24-48 hour sessions.

Some points from my side:

1) No developer has been forced to attend these Hackathons and each one is attending them on their own to satisfy whatever their need might be from the Hackathon. It could be the prize money offered, networking, learning about APIs in general, just spending time. In other words, who are we to judge someone and say that X is a zombie and is so infatuated with the programming bug that these Hackathons are a drug to X.

2) What is wrong in companies offering money to try out their APIs, to build a prototype or whatever. Another way to look at it is that the companies are not bothered about what products are built with their APIs during the hackathon, they are simply throwing money to win some eyeballs. Isnt that advertising ? And what is wrong with that ? Do you expect any developer (unless you are popular service) to simply start using your API without allocating $$$ in your budget towards building the developer community? Hackathons are just one of the mechanism IMO, to build your developer community, get some feedback from them and so on.

3) Hackathons are probably just the first step in the journey. API providers can approach the winners or interesting ideas that did not win and then encourage their development (by putting resources of course - time, people and money on the table) and take it forward.

4) There are instances when investors have been scouting around these events and independently opening up a channel with the developers if there is something of interest.

5) It does not help to state that developers are idiots and they continue to slog and work for long hours with low wages. At no point in time now or in the future, can we determine what is the right kind of compensation for the effort put in? Software development is not a mechanical task with fixed raw materials and that goes from Step 1 – Step 2 … Step 10. It is very difficult to come up with precise pricing that is agreeable to all. At the end of the day, as a software developer it is very encouraging to know that you will have a constant stream of work (and pay), provided you are willing to adjust, take some risks, keep learning new things, have a healthy network and have a good online presence.

In summary, it is the same ecosystem of give and take that we are seeing in action. And Hackathons are no different. In fact, I would encourage anyone who has never been to one to go out there, put your mind and effort to it in those 1-2 days and see for yourself, a side of yours that you never knew existed.

Both the days went off well with our topics ranging from setting up the Dev environment, Android Activities, Built In Intents and User Interface taking up the first day. The 2nd day kicked off with List Activities, Menu, Persistence Options, Networking and GPS/Maps. We rounded off the session with introduction to the Play Marketplace, building a APK and uploading the application into the Play Marketplace.

Here are some pictures from the workshop:

The feedback was great and my interaction with a completely unique batch this time has given me more insights on things that I can further tweak in the course.

It is satisfying to note that we have completed our 12th edition of the Workshop now. We plan to conduct another one in June. If you are interested, sign up for the mailing list to get notified when the dates are announced.

Till next time…

We thank them all and for everyone who has attended the workshop, we cannot thank you enough.

Here is a look at some statistics:

• 125+ people have attended the 2-Day Workshop
• If I count the workshop happening over this weekend, we have held 12 workshops in total
• 2 of them were for corporate clients
• 2 of them were overseas, in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. All the rest were held in Mumbai

Now for some fun facts:

• There have been no dropouts i.e. people who registered and then did not turn up for the workshop
• At least 15-20% of the participants were not familiar with Java, but that was not a stumbling block
• A majority of our workshops have been held at the Residency Hotel in Mumbai and we have got the opportunity to use all their meeting rooms
• 1 Batch had an average age of 20

We hope to continue the momentum in this year along with new courses. Yes – there has been a clear demand for different topics and rest assured that June will see the new courses debut.

Some people have asked me what keeps me going doing the same course over and over again? The reason is very simple: The biggest joy for me is to see the sheer delight in the participant eye’s when they run the mobile application on the device. That is the only fuel I need.

This happened for real and I am not making it up.

I went to recharge my mobile phone yesterday evening. To do that, I went to  a small electronic shop that also sells mobile phones, repairs mobile phones and does mobile recharge for prepaid customers like me. While the person helping me out was punching the mobile recharge amount on the phone, one fellow came in a hurry and simply said (I will use Hindi here):

Man : Tablet hain kya?  (English : Do you have a Tablet?)

Man at Shop Counter : Kya ? (English: What ? )

Man : Karbon Tablet hain kya? (English : Do you have the Karbon Tablet?)

Man at Shop Counter: Sorry. Baajoo ke Medical shop mein tablet milenga. (English : Sorry, you will get that in the medical shop next door)

I kept quiet about it but was amused for sure. The future is going to be very interesting…

The Mumbai Data Sets currently available are:

• Blood Banks in Mumbai
• Help line numbers
• Taxi/Auto Fare

The site is available at http://mumbaidata.cloudfoundry.com and every data set is available as a REST API. Here are the REST End points:

• Mumbai Blood Banks: http://mumbaidata.cloudfoundry.com/bloodbanks
• Mumbai Help Lines: http://mumbaidata.cloudfoundry.com/helplines
• Mumbai Taxi Fare: http://mumbaidata.cloudfoundry.com/taxifare
• Mumbai Auto Fare: http://mumbaidata.cloudfoundry.com/autofare

The application is a Node.js application and I loved the way Node made it possible for me to expose the API in rapid time. Cloud Foundry being a polyglot platform allowed me to deploy the Node.js application. It also powers some of my other Java based applications.

If you have not given Cloud Foundry a try, I definitely recommend it.

• All user requests have X-AppEngine-Region, X-AppEngine-City, and X-AppEngine-CityLatLong headers which contain location information based on the IP address of the client request. For a full description of these headers, see:
• https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/runtime#Request_Headers

I had covered earlier on X-AppEngine-country and the fact that it worked quite well. And I had suggested just offhand that Google should probably take this one still further and provide other fine grained information too like city. It looks like they have gone further than that and include region, city and latitude / longitude.

In addition to the X-AppEngine-Country in the request header, it has now introduced the following additional location based headers with each request:

• X-AppEngine-Region
• X-AppEngine-City
• X-AppEngine-CityLatLong

<h2>Hello My Friend. Your co-ordinates are: </h2>
<h3> Country : <%=request.getHeader("X-AppEngine-Country") %></h3>
<h3> Region : <%=request.getHeader("X-AppEngine-Region") %></h3>
<h3> City : <%=request.getHeader("X-AppEngine-City") %></h3>
<h3> Latitude,Longitude : <%=request.getHeader("X-AppEngine-CityLatLong") %></h3>

Since I live in India, it does a good job and prints out the following (as shown in the screenshot below):

You can try it too.

Do you envision using this in your application? What have you been using so far to get similar functionality?

Source Code on GitHub.

Of course I started following ProgrammableWeb much before I started writing for them and it has played a major role in starting the API revolution, that has changed forever the way we talk to applications. Its API directory is the largest and the only one of its kind and the daily stories keep throwing up some little gem or the other.

I hope that my stories have been informative over the years and with my 200th story now published “Will BYOD usher in APIzation of Enterprises“, I shall start once again towards the next set of stories.

Thank you John and Adam for this wonderful opportunity. Adam — you are the best Editor that I have worked with.

Check out the articles over the last 18 months…

Let me elaborate a bit. Consumer apps are not equal to Enterprise mobile apps. Enterprise mobile apps are a completely different breed of applications and have key characteristics that differentiate them from Consumer Apps. UI ‘Sexiness’ is not the norm typically and the focus is on key features like:

• Security
• Enterprise Integration
• Usability : Less keystrokes, Contextual Information
• Device Capabilities Integration : Support for barcode scanning, signature capture and much more.

Motorola RhoElements has signficantly added its extension to HTML via Javascript libraries that integrate with the device drivers at a low level, thus giving rise to extremely powerful Enterprise mobile applications that do all sorts of things like barcode scanning and are still written in pure HTML, Javascript and CSS.

The next version of RhoElements which consist of RhoMobile Suite is likely to push the envelope much further. Generation of Mobile Applications for target mobile OS like iOS, Android, BB and Windows Phone along with the RhoSync Cloud product to sync up your local transactions is going to be interesting.

During the event, I spoke for about 15 minutes on Day 1, where I shared my experience of RhoElements in brief and then on Day 2, I conducted a 2-hour workshop on ET1 (The Enterprise Grade Android Tablet from Motorola) where I demonstrated various development options like Native Android apps and HTML5 based apps. I covered some HTML5 concepts and then we did a deep dive into developing a HTML5 RhoElements application (with barcode scanning capability).

Take a look at the 2 presentations below:

The Future of Enterprise Mobile Development

Workshop on Application Development for Motorola RhoElements and ET1

A big Thank You to Motorola for giving me the opportunity to speak as an external consultant at the Channel Power conference.

The application titled “Light Me Up“ is a strategy game where you have  light up all the tiles on the board. The tiles toggle their light every time you tap on it and the catch is that it also toggles the vertical and horizontal row.

The game is slick looking, lets you choose your grid, colors and also saves high scores.

Great stuff Ajit ! May you release many such applications on the Play Store. Ajit is also blogging about his experiences writing Android applications and is sharing some great tips on Android programming. Take a look at his blog.

If you have attended my workshop and have published an Android application, please let me know. And of course, if you want to take your first steps to writing Android applications, come and attend my 2-Day Android workshop.