Thursday, November 6, 2008

Cisco Developer Contest

This hasn't had enough attention yet: Cisco is inviting application developers who "think outside the box", to innovate and promote the concept of the network as a platform. This is your opportunity to build exciting Linux based applications on the Cisco Application Extension Platform (AXP), and win a share of the total prize pool valued at US $100,000.

Read more at Cisco's contest site.

4 comments:

Jurjen said...

Actually, it is "Think inside the box".
Maybe a rainbow table to crack passing SHA encrypted passwords, and automatically send warning mail to the victims, before the fraudsters do?

Noah Gift said...

I actually brought this idea up when I interviewed with Google for a networking position. I also worked a company that is doing something close to this in Python. Plus, the book I wrote for O'Reilly kind of scratches the edges around this, in Python.

I agree with the premise. There is going to be a datacenter OS. I thnk Python is the right language for the job too, as you need a language that is quick to develop in, like Python to deal with the dynamic nature of the datacenter. I suspect SNMP will play a huge role, which btw, I covered in my book in Python, I think the only book ever to cover that topic :)

networkfan said...

Hi there,

This is a great opportunity to trigger innovation on an open platform.

But I feel that in a world where we are increasingly seeing software offered as a hosted service, it becomes really critical that there is a strong tie between the network and the applications, more importantly in a secure manner.

What the world really needs is an open network platform. I would like to see the likes of Google, and Cisco push towards such an open platform - Open up the network APIs, Google development infrastructure APIs...


I haven't look into the details, but looks like they are hosting Linux platform in their routers and opening up the APIs..
and I think they have vmware support as well..


Cheers,
networkfan

Guido van Rossum said...

Irony oh irony: Cisco is being sued by the FSF: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2008-12-cisco-complaint