Day Software Awards First JCR Cup Winner

By Irina Guseva | Published Jan 30, 2009

Day Software is very involved in the community building efforts if you haven’t noticed. Today, Day announced Russell Toris, a second-year, computer science degree college student at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as the winner of Day's inaugural JCR Cup 2008.

Day's first JCR Cup is a competition to award those developing unique software applications based on Day CRX, a commercial content infrastructure platform based on Apache Jackrabbit and Apache Sling.

Go, Toris!

Toris' JCR-based web clipping application called Crux beat out over 50 entries in Day's JCR Cup 2008. Toris named his JCR-based application as a word play on Day CRX name.

Toris' Crux application provides users with a web clipping service so that they can simply surf the web, highlight interesting material on web pages and then save the content with an URL to the source using standard keyboard Copy and Paste command. This is the bookmarking-free freedom so desired by many college students buried in papers and research assignments.

Toris says, "The idea with Crux is, you can save the URL of a page, along with the portion of the page content you're interested in, and only that portion — the crux of the page — in the JCR repository. That way you're saving only what you need: the URL, the content you're interested in, and any tags or comments you want to apply. That's it."

David Nuescheler, Day's co-founder and CTO, and the man behind the JCR Cup initiative, says: "Russell's entry showed brilliance. A useful application, an innovative application — elegantly executing and really showcasing the power and simplicity of CRX."

Go, Day!

Day's panel of judges evaluated the JCR Cup entries. Toris’ winning idea was chosen due to its “power and simplicity” and was seen as a natural complement to the power and simplicity of CRX.

Day's CMO Kevin Cohrane tells us that Toris is absolutely thrilled about winning the Cup. Toris said this about working with CRX: "I was surprised how easy it was to get started with JCR, even for a new programmer like me. I know a little bit of Java, but I mainly write JavaScript. So I was really, really happy when I saw how much you can do with JCR and Sling just using HTML and JavaScript… You don't have to be a Java expert at all."

We find it quite admirable that some commercial Web Content Management vendors find time to get involved with the community and make kids (one at a time) happy and interested in learning the technology. Toris' prize was a new MacBook Pro to help him feed his passion for CRX and Web 2.0.

Day + CRX + Community

Day is well-known for its support of open source Apache technologies. Day’s core WCM product CQ5 is built on top of the CRX, a content repository based on the implementation of Apache Jackrabbit and Apache Sling. CRX is a JSR-170-compliant Java Content Repository (JCR).

Awarding new talent in the CRX space is nothing but a good strategy for Day to keep building and supporting the community around Apache- and CRX-related technologies. For us, it’s just heart-warming to see commercial vendors take interest (albeit, not entirely altruistic and non-commercial) in those “green” yet enthusiastic.

At Gilbane SF this June, Day plans to announce the JCR Cup 2009 submissions, as well as a brand new competition — the CEVA Cup that will focus on apps for verticals built on top of CRX and on top of CQ5.

The community will also be able to participate in voting and selecting the winner. The winners should be announced at the Global Customer Summit in October, where winners will present their innovations to the public. In the meantime, Day is working on adding an apps store to the web site to allow people to download those submissions as free open source applications and test them.