CodeFire is up at ASE, Bangalore !

Project CodeFire is finally done and set-up on a node at the lab. It took a lotta time to finish off. Thanks to stupid lab timings and lack of dedicated HRs at systems group, we took more than 2 months to finish it. As the sems gonna end soon I won't expect much activity on CodeFire. Next sem its gonna be better with juniors and seniors combined participation.
I'v gotta run this project very well otherwise there will be no meaning to the efforts of me and Shaabi.Wait for a demo on my blog... I'v also plans to make it more portable and put it up on sourceforge and code.google.com.

The philosophy behind CodeFire

Well, we have seen a lot of people who know one or the other programming languages. We can see them all over India. You can find so many people taking C/C++ courses, yet another huge lot taking up Java courses. Do you think merely joining such courses or learning what is done in the B.Tech syllabus, is enough to solve real world problems ? You might have seen what a structure is in C/C++ but, you never came to see how it can help simplify complicated problems of reality. You might have learnt sorting algorithms, but how many time you have used it to do something other than solving the test paper ? What point I'm trying to bring out is that, something is lacking in the learning process. Its the 'Application' of what we have learnt. And CodeFire my friends, is the platform where you can come up, show off ur skills, compete with others, and learn more better ways to fulfill this gap.

What CodeFire aims to do is to create a competitive environment for all those who would love to be better programmers of the future. CodeFire is open to all, there is no restriction of branch, year, age etc.

In December 2007, we went for ACM-ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) Asia round. Our teams got ranks 32 and 36 respectively. Overall 100 teams from all over India and Asia participated. We think we can do a lot better! And CodeFire is what is gonna help us create the very best teams out of our institution to be sent to such contests....

Posters for CodeFire

Its still in development stage... so I have this poster to create some buzz at the college!

I'm expecting more people to join and compete from next semester. This time we hardly had any time to launch it off properly.

Basic feature and functionality plan for CodeFire

The above two slides depict the bare basic idea behind CodeFire. You can also checkout what backend supports each feature and operation. Thats the idea over which me and Shaabi plan to develop CodeFire.
As you can guess PHP & MySQL will be the key ingredients of interface while GCC will be at the heart of CodeFire.

Write-ups for CodeFire

What's CodeFire?
CodeFire is an online programming contest platform which supports C/C++. Its main objective is to create competition among programmers at Amrita School of Engineering, Bangalore. It is open to everyone to participate and it is running all time on the intranet.

How it works?
CodeFire basically utilises power of PHP & MySQL over WAMP server employing DevCPP compiler and i/o redirection routines written in C with a little bit of VisualBasic.
Basically the presentation of CodeFire which you get at http://ieee:81/codefire is written in HTML & PHP. This interface lets you register, browse questions, upload/write solutions, edit solutions, change password, see other's profiles, etc. At the other side as you interact with CodeFire in your browser, the MySQL database stores all your details and statistics. Whenever you submit a solution, the judges get to see all your submissions and at one click your program is compiled, and outputs compared for correctness. If you get correct outputs at first try, you are eligible for total score, otherwise your score reduces as your trials increase. The compiler used is DevCPP (you can download it here). The stdin and stdout is redirected to files, for checking, so its best to use only standard C/C++ i/o functions.

Who made it ?
CodeFire has been developed by Abhishek Mishra (BG107CS004) and Mohammad Shaabi Amir (BG107CS***) from ASE, Bangalore. Abhishek has basically done major work with website's interface and auto-compilation, Shaabi has worked with the core functioning of the site, ie. developing the whole framework in PHP & MySQL. We welcome more suggestions and ideas to make CodeFire better for everyone.

to be shown on about page of CodeFire.