Press Release
Instantis announces the winners of its 2002 SiteWand Web Application Developer Challenge
Sunnyvale, CA — December 20, 2002 — Instantis®, a pioneer in the transformation of business processes into Web solutions, today announced the winners of its 2002 SiteWand Web Application Developer Challenge held between December 3 and December 13, 2002. Keyang Wang, a systems and software engineer at a major telecommunications company, won the first prize. The second prize went to Jim Whitfield, an independent software developer.
The developer challenge, organized by Instantis, was to create a "blog" or a discussion group application on the SiteWand platform for Web applications and Web services. Contestants were exposed to the SiteWand platform for the first time in a two-hour training session to learn how to develop Web applications using SiteWand. They were then provided access to the SiteWand platform from Instantis' hosted environment for the duration of the contest. Contestants only had eight working days to complete, test, debug, and deploy the application.
As the contestants discovered, developing the Web application was significantly easier on SiteWand than with custom programming on a Java platform. Keyang states, "In most Web applications, the majority of the code is to validate user input, create/update/read/delete (so-called CRUD) database records, and then decide which page to send back to the user. To manually code the logic is tedious, repetitive and error-prone, and SiteWand automates the steps to create the logic. And, SiteWand checks programming errors at development time, so you can find and fix the errors very quickly. The applications developed in SiteWand are also easier to maintain, since you create the application by specifying the business rules at a higher level instead of burying the business logic deep in the code as in direct programming in Java."
Says Tom Rokicki, Director of Engineering and an Instantis founder, "It is very impressive to me that with just two hours of training, the contestants were able to create relatively sophisticated applications on SiteWand in little more than a week. We congratulate Keyang and Jim on their achievement!"
On the ease of learning to develop on SiteWand, Keyang states, "SiteWand is visionary, one-of-a-kind, and it is very easy to learn for people who have some Web development experience. Other people have created frameworks, tools, and libraries, but I believe SiteWand is the only technology out there that puts all the good things together. The request-handler-response model is easy to follow and it is very easy to use the Web user interface to create engines and queries. The end product of the development is a user-readable specification instead of big blocks of codes."
Jim likewise found development with SiteWand very easy, and states, "I found putting together a discussion thread application took no server-side programming and just a modest amount of Web-based configuration. I had the primary server logic done in hours. All that was left was the graphic design necessary for the user experience."
Overall, says Keyang on his experience with the challenge: "I had very good experience with the contest. SiteWand is a very good technology to consider for anyone working on Web application development."
About Instantis
Instantis provides Global 2000 companies with the fastest, most economical way to respond to custom Web application and Web Service needs. By leveraging unique methodology and innovative technology, Web applications for business automation created with the SiteWand platform are delivered 5 times faster and at half the cost of other custom alternatives. A wide range of developers from HTML authors to Java developers can use SiteWand to harness the power of Java without having to master its complexity.
Instantis customers include BellSouth, Compex Legal Services, Cooper Cameron Corporation, McKesson, Sperry Van Ness, Wells Fargo, the Wharton School, and XO Communications. These and other customers use SiteWand for Web-based handling of complex enterprise processes like order processing and billing, project and activity management, dynamic document creation, case and exception handling, and event management.
Instantis was founded in 1999 and is backed by leading institutions including JK&B Capital and Goldman Sachs. Instantis partners include Adobe, HP, IBM, Macromedia, Satyam, Syntel, and Sun Microsystems.
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Shekar Ayyar |
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