University of Sydney students and staff with the Elsevier team from NY; Scott Robbins, James Alexander, Seb Pauka, James Curran, Vishal Gupta & Ben Rubin

Registrations began at 11 am with a steady stream of competitors getting settled in a modified School of IT Boardroom. With ‘chill-out’ zones outside in the winter garden, equipped with couches and xBox games, fully catered meals, our own ‘Sydney Hackathon Cafe’ and the Lecture theatre for presentations, there was always something for contestants to do.

At 3pm Brett Morgan, Nick Johnson and Stephanie Borgman, from Google’s Sydney office, gave a presentation to contestants in a break-out session about Google’s Blogger API and App Engine hosting platform. They were also kind enough to add in limited edition merchandise for all 4 winner prize packs and a free ‘Android’ T-shirt for all contestants.

After the Google presentation each team pitched their idea before buckling down for the rest of the competition. While the chill-out zone, food and coffee helped keep energy levels high, come 3am there were a few taking naps in various locations around the School of IT before the final morning sprint!

Groups buckling down for the night, twitter wall behind

There were 11 applications presented at the end of the Hackathon and the applications ranged from games, search tools, professor genealogy tools to collaborative commenting of journal articles. The applications were web gadgets that embedded on Elsevier’s SciVerse platform, a platform used by 15 million researchers and academics.

Elsevier’s development and product team, who flew out from America and China to attend and help with the Hackathon, noted the quality and depth of some of the applications created in the 24 hours. The judges also commented on the quality of the applications presented.

The judges were a range of academic and recognised industry figures. Lee Berry, a systems architect at IBM, Anne Bartlett-Bragg, managing director of Asia Pacific region for Headshift, John Shipp from the University of Sydney Library, Dr Bo Yin from NICTA and Rachel Sieff from the New South Wales Department of Industry and Innovation.

In the end only three teams could be awarded the prizes with one team winning both a prize and the People’s Choice Award;

• 1st place went to Presentify: Tim Dawborn, Seb Pauka and James Alexander, all students at the University of Sydney, created an application that turns any journal article on Elsevier’s SciVerse platform into an HTML5 presentation, automatically filling in the presentation with content section titles, images and charts and some summary text from the article.
• 2nd place went to SciPlay: Sam Thorogood, School of IT Alumni, and Nicky Ringland, postgraduate at the School of IT, came second with a game that quizzes users on the SciVerse platform about the journal article their currently reading. Users can then earn points for each correctly answered quiz that increases their ranking on the platform.
• 3rd place went to Macadeima; a search and work flow aid that displays relevant journal articles and videos to users browsing auricles on the SciVerse platform. It also allowed for users to add comments about the article and start a discussion without leaving the page.
• People’s Choice award was given to SciPlay. The People’s Choice was was voted on by the contestants.

SciPlay presenting their application, which won 2nd prize and People's Choice award

Elsevier’s SciVerse product manager Ben Rubin and systems developer Scott Robbins, both who were also present for the entire hackathon, expressed interest in all the winning applications and some of the other non-winning applications and will be contacting the contestants over the coming week about further development and launching the applications on the SciVerse platform.

During the competition there was a live twitter wall, that was used for quick messages and links for contestants to use, Facebook was constantly updated with photos from the competition and our on-site barista and catering made sure people had the fuel to keep on going.

Overall the Hackathon organisers, University of Sydney academics, Elsevier team and the judges were extremely impressed by the creativity and quality of the applications presented at the end of the Sydney Hackathon.

Sydney Hackathon was great event that brought together developers and professionals in great environment. A lot of the competitors were already expressing ideas of how they will prepare for next years Sydney Hackathon.

Great photos on Facebook can be found here. Videos and photo albums of the event will be posted on this website later this week.

Please leave any feedback about Sydney Hackathon 2011 below, or contact us.

Presentify team Tim Dawborn, Seb Pauka and James Alexander presenting their winning application

Sydney Hackathon contestants at the 'SydHack cafe' - Our on all barista for the competition

Google give a presentation on their APIs and workplace

Teams working hard through the night

Step 1
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34189153/step1.xml

Step 2
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34189153/Step2.xml

Step 3
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34189153/step3.xml

Context Info
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34189153/context.xml

URL Gadget
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34189153/URL_Example.xml

{
name: “bob”,
eyeColor: “red”,
height:”10ft”,
age: 25
}

If this were processed into an object, you could access person.name and get “bob”.  So here is the code!

Enjoy!

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<Module>
  <ModulePrefs description="Displays the context information made available to the gadget.">
    <Require feature="opensocial-0.9" />
    <Require feature="sciverse" />
    <Require feature="dynamic-height"/>
  </ModulePrefs>
  <UserPref name="secureAuthtoken" datatype="hidden" />
  <Content type="html" view="canvas,profile">
	<![CDATA[
	<script type="text/javascript">

		function getContextInfo(){
			gadgets.sciverse.getContextInfo(contextCallback);
		}

		function contextCallback(obj){

		    var rs = JSON.stringify(obj);

		   //Format the string for display.
		    rs = rs.replace(/",/g,"\",<br>");

		    var contextInfo = document.getElementById("contextInfo");
		    contextInfo.innerHTML = rs;

 		    gadgets.window.adjustHeight();

		}

		gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler(getContextInfo);

	</script>

	<p><a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="getContextInfo();">Reload Context Info</a></p>

	<div>
	  	<span>Secured Authtoken is: </span> <span>__UP_secureAuthtoken__ </span>
	</div>
	<div><u>Context Info:</u></div>
	<div id="contextInfo" style="display:block">

	</div>

	  ]]>

  </Content>
</Module>

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<Module>
<ModulePrefs
        title="SciVerse Examples - Content API Call 1"
        title_url="http://developer.sciverse.com"
        author_email="you@you.com"
        description="Intro to Gadgets">
    <Require feature="opensocial-0.9" />
    <Require feature="sciverse" />
    <Require feature="hub" />
    <Require feature="dynamic-height"/>
    <Require feature="org.jquery.core-1.4.2" />
    <Optional feature="content-rewrite">
           <Param name="exclude-url">*</Param>
    </Optional>
</ModulePrefs>
<UserPref name="searchTerms" datatype="hidden" />
<Content type="url" view="profile,canvas" href="http://www.reddit.com/r/sydney"></Content>

</Module>

So here we go..  All I really added was a couple more functions, a  number of results global variable, and my api key as a global variable.  As for the new funcitons, one makes the call to the content API and the other handles the response.  The console.log(text) call will show you what actually comes back from the Content API call. This can be useful to see what the data actually looks like, but once you know, you should probably get rid of it.   If you aren’t familiar with the JSON part of the code, don’t worry, I’ll try to follow up with an intro to basic JSON, or you can ask me tomorrow at the hack .

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<Module>
<ModulePrefs
        title="SciVerse Examples - Content API Call 1"
        title_url="http://developer.sciverse.com"
        author_email="you@you.com"
        description="Intro to Gadgets">
    <Require feature="opensocial-0.9" />
    <Require feature="sciverse" />
    <Require feature="hub" />
    <Require feature="dynamic-height"/>
    <Require feature="org.jquery.core-1.4.2" />
</ModulePrefs>

<Content type="html" view="profile,canvas"><![CDATA[

<style>
	 #content_div{
		padding-top:15px;
	 	text-align:center;
		font-weight:bold;
	 }

	 .red{
	 	color:red;
		text-decoration:underline;

	 }

</style>

<script type="text/javascript" >  

	// global variables
	var myapikey = "30b684c9d37d7c9805e77d106a344df2";
	var context;
	var authTok;
	var searchTerms;
	var numberOfSearchResultsToReturn = 50;

	//The URL for the content API search call
	var apiSearchURL = "http://api.elsevier.com/content/search/index:";

	/**
	 * 'run' is called when the 'onload' event is triggered after the page finished loading
	 */
	function run()
	{
		// the getContextInfo is a framework API call that returns the ContextInfo object.
		// @see http://developer.sciverse.com/framework#context
		gadgets.sciverse.getContextInfo(init);
	}

	/**
	 * 'init' initializes the gadget. it sets the user's search term as the default search term.
	 * this is called when the contextInfo call above succeeds.
	 */
	function init(data){
		context = data;
		searchTerms = context.searchTerms;
		authTok = context.secureAuthtoken;
		makeContentApiCall();
	}

	/**
	* Prepare to make the content api call.
	*/

	function makeContentApiCall()
	{
		//get the search terms
		var SDSearchString = searchTerms;

		//url encode them so they don't mess up the html request
		SDSearchString = encodeURIComponent(SDSearchString);

		var nrOfResults = numberOfSearchResultsToReturn;
		var view = "COMPLETE";

		//the cluster or index we want to search against.
		var cluster = "SCIDIR";

		var search = apiSearchURL + cluster + "?query=" + SDSearchString + "&count="+nrOfResults+"&view="+view;

		//setup the authentication part of the call.
		/**You must have a apikey AND authtoken for content api calls**/
		var requestHeaders = {};
		requestHeaders['X-ELS-APIKey'] = myapikey;
		requestHeaders['X-ELS-Authtoken'] = authTok;
		makeApiRequest(search, apiResponse, requestHeaders);         

	}

	function makeApiRequest(url, callback, requestHeaders)
	{
	    var params = {};
	    params[gadgets.io.RequestParameters.HEADERS] = requestHeaders;
	    gadgets.sciverse.makeRequest(url, callback, params);
	}

	function apiResponse(obj){
	    var output = "";

	    if(obj == null){
		//if there is no response then we had an error
		var display = "<b><font color='red'>return object == null</font></b>";

		//use JQuery to set the html for the div
		$('#content_div').html(display);
		return;
	    }

	    var text = obj['text'];

	    // @see http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=Gadgets.json_%28v0.9%29
	    var textJson = gadgets.json.parse(text);

	    console.log(text);

	    //is there even any results?
	    if(!textJson){
		var display = "<b><font color='red'>parsing results returned nothing</font></b>"
		$('#content_div').html(display);
		return;
	    }

	    // @see http://www.json.org/js.html
	    var entries = textJson['search-results']['entry'];
	    numberOfEntries = entries.length;
	    output = output + "<b>number of entries: " + numberOfEntries + "</b><br>";

	    // @see http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.each/
	    $.each(entries, function(i1, entry){
		var title = entry['dc:title'];
		output = output + (i1+1) + ". " + title + "<br>";
	    });

	    $('#content_div').html(output);
	}

	// @see http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=Gadgets.util_%28v0.9%29#gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler
	//regester the onload function. When the page is fully loaded it will call this function
	gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler(run);

</script>

	<div id="content_div" style="font-size: 10;"></div>

]]></Content>

</Module>

On a side note:  One thing that might help new people to using some of the jquery functionality (code with $( ) ), is some JQuery Cheat sheets. Check it out here.  The JQuery Documentation can also be found at JQuery’s Site.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<Module>
<ModulePrefs
        title="SciVerse Examples - Content API Call 1"
        title_url="http://developer.sciverse.com"
        author_email="you@you.com"
        description="Intro to Gadgets">
    <Require feature="opensocial-0.9" />
    <Require feature="sciverse" />
    <Require feature="hub" />
    <Require feature="dynamic-height"/>
    <Require feature="org.jquery.core-1.4.2" />
</ModulePrefs>

<UserPref name="secureAuthtoken" datatype="hidden" />
<UserPref name="myPref" datatype="hidden" default_value="This is my custom Pref" />
<Content type="html" view="profile,canvas"><![CDATA[

<style>
	 #content_div{
		padding-top:15px;
	 	text-align:center;
		font-weight:bold;
	 }

	 .red{
	 	color:red;
		text-decoration:underline;

	 }

</style>

<script type="text/javascript" >  

	// global variables
	var myapikey = "your api-key here";
	var context;
	var authTok;
	var searchTerms;

	/**
	 * 'run' is called when the 'onload' event is triggered after the page finished loading
	 */
	function run()
	{
		// the getContextInfo is a framework API call that returns the ContextInfo object.
		// @see http://developer.sciverse.com/framework#context
		gadgets.sciverse.getContextInfo(init);
	}

	/**
	 * 'init' initializes the gadget. it sets the user's search term as the default search term.
	 * this is called when the contextInfo call above succeeds.
	 */
	function init(data){
		context = data;
		searchTerms = context.searchTerms;
		authTok = context.secureAuthtoken;
		makeContentApiCall();
	}

	/**
	* Prepare to make the content api call.
	*/

	function makeContentApiCall()
	{  

		$("#content_div").append("<div>This is an auth Token from Context: <span class='red'> " + authTok + "</span></div><br/>");
		$("#content_div").append("<div>This is an auth Token from User Preferences: <span class='red'> __UP_secureAuthtoken__ </span></div><br/>");
		$("#content_div").append("<div>This is a custom user Preference:<span class='red'> __UP_myPref__ </span></div><br/>");
		$("#content_div").append("<div>The User's search terms:<span class='red'> " + searchTerms + "</span></div>");

		//automatically resize the height of the gadget to fit the content vertically
		//adjustHeight can also take a value like "399px"
		gadgets.window.adjustHeight();

	};

	// @see http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=Gadgets.util_%28v0.9%29#gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler
	//regester the onload function. When the page is fully loaded it will call this function
	gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler(run);

</script>
<div id="content_div" style="font-size: 10;"></div>

]]></Content>

</Module>

Where are you going to place your application? – Applications appear within the SciVerse products (ScienceDirect, Scopus and Hub) via integration points.  For a handy list of integration points including screenshots, check out our integration points page.  See my next point before choosing SciVerse Hub.

Don’t forget our bugs! - With our recent release, we have a few obnoxious bugs running around our systems.  Namely, you cannot use content API calls via SciVerse Hub.  I’d like to make you aware of our troubleshooting page where you can get more information about our dirty laundry.

Need some inspiration?  Not sure what kind of application you want to build?  Don’t forget to check out some of the applications in our Gallery!

Having a problem developing your application?  Unfortunately, we could only bring one of our devs to Australia.  We are lucky though that a few will be available in the US to help out.  If you have a question and can’t get an immediate answer-  post it in our forum!   We will be working with our state-side colleagues to try to answer as many questions as possible.  You can also check out other questions that have already been answered.

Love the  secure authoken!  Our content API’s can only be accessed within the SciVerse Applications framework and require a secure authtoken.  Make sure to keep up with Scott’s posts to get more information about how to correctly make calls to the content API’s.

The framework API’s are your friend!  The structure and organization of Elsevier data can be a bit complex, and it can take a while to get a handle on the content API’s.  Luckily, we have the framework API’s to save the day.  Make sure to take a look at our Application Framework page to get a refresher on the API capabilities  and our Framework API page for a list of the actual API calls.

Really bored?  If you get really bored, or hit a wall – check out our Facebook page from our hackathon in Singapore.  You can view videos from the winners of that hack to get some ideas about your own application!

That’s it for now!  Can’t wait for the hacking to begin!

For this example,  you’ll need to select the ScienceDirect Results page as your integration point when you create the gadget. It should look something like this:

Search Results Integration Point

All this gadget will do is print out the user’s search terms.  So to test the gadget, go to ScienceDirect, log in, and run a search. You should see something like this on the left hand side of your screen.  The text in the gadget will match whatever you searched for.

Step 1 Gadget

So how do we do this?  Well, here is the xml for our first basic gadget:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<Module>
<ModulePrefs
        title="Step 1"
        title_url="http://developer.sciverse.com"
        author_email="you@you.com"
        description="Intro to Gadgets">
    <Require feature="opensocial-0.9" />
    <Require feature="sciverse" />
    <Require feature="hub" />
    <Require feature="org.jquery.core-1.4.2" />
</ModulePrefs>

<Content type="html" view="profile,canvas"><![CDATA[

<style>
	 #content_div{
		padding-top:15px;
	 	text-align:center;
		font-weight:bold;
	 }

</style>

<script type="text/javascript" >  

	// global variables
	var context;
	var searchTerms;
	var docTitle;
	/**
	 * 'run' is called when the 'onload' event is triggered after the page finished loading
	 */
	function run()
	{
		// the getContextInfo is a framework API call that returns the ContextInfo object.
		// @see http://developer.sciverse.com/framework#context
		gadgets.sciverse.getContextInfo(init);
	}

	/**
	 * 'init' initializes the gadget. it sets the user's search term as the default search term.
	 * this is called when the contextInfo call above succeeds.
	 */
	function init(data){
		context = data;
		searchTerms = context.searchTerms;

		$("#content_div").html(searchTerms);

	}

	// @see http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=Gadgets.util_%28v0.9%29#gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler
	//regester the onload function. When the page is fully loaded it will call this function
	gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler(run);

</script>

	<div id="content_div" style="font-size: 10;"></div>

]]></Content>

</Module>

The Module Preferences section:
<ModulePrefs title=”MyAwesomeGadget” author_email=”you@your.domain”>

  </ModulePrefs>

The user preference section:

<UserPref name=”secureAuthtoken” datatype=”hidden” />

Then the Content sections.  You can have a content section for each type of integration point.  See here for info on integration points.  You can also combine integration point definitions by simply listing them  (i.e. view=”profile, canvas”)

  <Content type="html" view="profile">
  <![CDATA[
     <!-- The code for the view is here. -->
  ]]>
  </Content>

When all of this is combined, you will have the basic skeleton for a gadget:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<Module>
  <ModulePrefs title="MyAwesomeGadget" author_email="you@your.domain">

  </ModulePrefs>

  <UserPref name="secureAuthtoken" datatype="hidden" />

  <Content type="html" view="profile">
  <![CDATA[

    <!-- The code for the view is here. -->

  ]]>
  </Content>
</Module>

Featured App iSpeech

The iSpeech Audio Reader text-to-speech application instantly converts any full-text article within SciVerse ScienceDirect, a source of peer-reviewed scientific content containing more than 10 million articles, into a natural sounding voice file.

It enables researchers to easily convert articles into MP3 audio files and listen to them on any MP3-friendly device.