In our previous post we promised some pictures from the Java programming competition Codingball 2008, so here they are.

Early birds were gathered for a half an hour before the beginning of the Codingball 2008 registration, eagerly awaiting for competition to start. After one trial task, which got our competitors familiar with the system and warmed them up, competition has begun.

Four silent hours and seven wicked algorithm problems later, it’s all concluded with Milos Lazarevic as a winner, and Ilic brothers - Aleksandar and Andreja, taking the second and the third place, respectively.

Radomir Mladenovic, jury president (standing in the middle) monitors preliminary system testing, while competitors have one trial task to solve

The winner, Milos Lazarevic (in the middle) receives the 1st prize from Mladen Stojanovic, CEO (on the right). The 2nd place prize goes to Aleksandar Ilic (on the left)

Congratulations to the best three competitors, as well as all the others who put the fierce fight throughout the event.

To see more photos follow our flickr link…

Codingball 2008 - Coding Challenge, the programming competition organized by the student association EESTEC and Troxo is going to take place in our offices on Saturday, May 10th 2008. Twenty-two talented students have been selected to compete in algorithms and Java programming.

Each programmer will be given seven tasks and four hours to solve them. The competitors will upload their code for each task to the centralized, automated Programming Contest Control System which will evaluate the solution and update the scoreboards. The competitor who solves the most of the tasks wins. If two competitors solve the same number of tasks, the faster one wins.

We are looking forward to this event and hope to have a lot of fun and meet interesting people. The three best competitors will receive some very nice prizes that we have prepared, and we are throwing a party for all the competitors and organizers later in the evening. We’ll get back with some pics after the event.

We in Troxo are switching to Eclipse for PHP development. It’s a great tool. The best thing about it is a long list of plugins available. Here is a checklist of things you have to have for PHP coding in Eclipse:

• PDT (PHP Development Tools) - This is what actually enables you to use Eclipse for PHP development. It can be installed using Eclipse update site, but if you are doing PHP development only, then it is the best to download “all in one package” and not to bother with plugin dependencies. There is also PHPEclipse project, but unfortunately the latest release is from April, 2006 (for Eclipse 3.1).
• JSEclipse - The most popular JavaScript editor for Eclipse. It makes your life as a JS coder much easier. If you want more powerful features, go on and search for Aptana IDE. Actually, Aptana IDE is also Eclipse based editor, so it should be easy to install PDT plugin and get full PHP support.
• Subclipse - Powerful SVN client that integrates into Eclipse IDE. For the ones who have never used Eclipse, there is also a "local history" feature that enables you to restore your file as it was before you tried to implement your brilliant idea, which actually turned out not to be so brilliant
• Mylin - Makes your Trac tasks part of Eclipse IDE, so there is no need to visit your Trac Tickets page in order to find out what you should work on. So, in combination with Subclipse it enables you to stay with your favorite IDE from nine to five
• Eclipse Data Tools Platform - integrates database tools into your Eclipse environment. In order to use it, you will have to download the appropriate JDBC driver for your database (for MySQL you can find them here), setup database connection, and you are ready to view database schema and create and execute database queries.

Finally, XDebug - well this is not an Eclipse plugin, but it was worth mentioning it because it’s hard to make it work with Eclipse. Thanks to the great blog post Debugging PHP with PDT and XDebug it is now easy to have debugging environment for your PHP projects.