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Finally we have a result, it has taken weeks of judging and lots of hardwork. The scores are ready and today I will first announce the runners up from the Top 6. I will then tomorrow announce the 3rd place, then day after that second, you get the idea. The scoring was based upon a point system in which each judge had to rank the top 6 in order. The points from each judge were then compiled and the final scores calculated.

Before we get onto the results I would just like to thank everyone who entered the competition, although it has been a lot of hard work it has been great fun as well. I hope to run more competitions in the future and will be looking for more sponsors for bigger and better prizes (hint: if you work for any PHP related company and want coverage then get in touch!)

The results are given below.

Before you read some of the quotes and comments for the last 3 entries I would like to mention that very few of the entries I received ‘worked out of the box’ and in
most cases needed some kind of configuration. Although the rules stated (I thought clearly) many entries had warnings/notices so I had to take the decision that because
so many broke the rules that I had to make judgement calls on what got included, I did also instruct each of the Judges to make their own judgements to take into account
entries that were troublesome to work.

JB

This one did properly handle the transition from hand to foot. The code is not elegant and I do not believe that it is ultimately maintainable. Some of the classes are documented, others lack any documentation at all. The UI is confusing as well. It was unclear that there were 3 methods to input the information. Finally, the author actually uses a globals statement. (Oh the horror) While it did succeed with my test, I cannot say that this is a good example of programming.

• Worked out of the box
• “Clunky” interface
• Dictionary upload limited to 100k for no apparent reason - very small for a dictionary file
• WAP version is a nice idea, implementation is a bit messy
• Minimal commenting
• Partial separation of code and presentation
• Lots and lots of notices generated when solving - appears to be one for each candidate word
• Use of dict.org to lookup word definitions is a nice touch

Maurice Fonk

While I would have loved to have seen this one because it runs on the Zend Framework, I could not make it work. Most attempts to properly install it simply gave a 500 Error.

• Does not work out of the box, needed to be located in /wordgame
• Uses Zend Framework
• Algorithm uses recursion
• Start and end words of different length give an error or “End word not in dictionary”

Rob Haynes

The UI isn’t as nice as the first two and a bit confusing. I’m not really told what I’m supposed to upload or pull from a URL. I tried just using a word list but then it told me I didn’t enter a wordlist. The code is nicely formatted and mostly OO although he does have more procedural than I think is necessary. As with the first one, I was expected to enter the entire list of words to transform hand to foot and it would figure it out.

• Worked out of the box
• Extremely confusing interface
• Multi-lingual
• According to the supporting documentation, modifying the system in any way requires changes to the code, including adding a dictionary

I had planned to launch the results with the ability to view each of the entries but Stuart (one of the judges) was hosting them but had a major problem with his web server and will take a few days for us to set them up again.

Third place will be announced tomorrow.