Component Development Competition Summary

by ivern,
TopCoder Staff
Friday, March 11, 2005


The TCCC component competition was actually two separate competitions: design and development. For the development competition, the participants were given a finished component on which they were required to perform a number of enhancements. Each enhancement on the list had an associated point score, which along with its review score determined how many points the submitter received for that task.

Before getting to the finals, the competitors had to progress through four rounds of online competition. The four competitors who obtained the highest aggregate score among their top three components advanced to the finals, which were also held online.

The development finals component was a Dependency Map Renderer. This component displays a complex dependency map as an image. The image created by this component will be in different formats depending on the renderer used to create the image. A pluggable interface allows multiple renderers to be added to the component. The initial renderer supplied with the component creates SVG graphics. In addition to supporting multiple renderers, a pluggable layout engine is also included with the component. The layout engine allows different style formatting for the produced image. TopCoder intends to use this component to graphically depict relationships between components. Now developers will be able to browse and view the hierarchy of components.

The enhancements the submitters worked on ranged from adding a method to render a number of diagrams at once to altering the layout manager to compress the resulting images.