I am (finally) excited to announce the winner of our $100 Hackathon contest! As you all recall, we released the WSDL 2 Apex project as open-source in September. If you don’t recall, you can recall by reading my previous blog post on the topic: My Previous Blog Post On The Topic
In that announcement, I challenged you to put on your coding gloves and box the heck out of those pesky frustrations you had with the current WSDL 2 Apex generator. Daniel Ballinger, better known as “FishOfPrey”, punched out not one, not two, but three issues in a short amount of time. He is your $100 Hackathon Champion!
What did our FishOfPrey friend fix? I’m glad you asked! The main thing that he fixed was adding integer and boolean as reserved keywords, such that variables of these types get the _x suffix like their primitive colleagues. More consistent output for you and your WSDL generations! He also fixed an issue with different delimiters in WSDL files created in Windows, and removed the size limitation on the WSDL file. Yes, that is right; the open source WSDL generator does not have all of the limitations of the multi-tenant online version. Hooray, open source!
Here is my interview with Daniel, which did not actually take place:
Josh: Congratulations on winning!
FishOfPrey: Thanks!
Josh: What is a “fish of prey”? Is that the predator who chases the prey? Or the fish running away from said predator?
FishOfPrey: Well, it depends on…
Josh (interrupting): I mean, are you a shark? A barracuda? A minnow? I must know.
FishOfPrey: I suppose barracuda? Could be either the predator or the prey, depending on the day? What does this have to do with code?
Josh: Nothing, really. But seriously, you did a bang-up job! Can people send you gifts?
FishOfPrey: Yes, so long as they are not sending sharks or other large ocean predators.
As you can see, Daniel and I are challenging you again. Who among you is a shark? Who can tackle the big open items in the WSDL 2 Apex generator? A shark does not need a hackathon! Mark Cuban has a whole tank of sharks on TV, and they don’t need hackathons! If you get stuck while doing Apex class generation, shark-up™ and fix the problem. You will get help from the team and the community; we all want to make this code project as robust as possible.