At JavaOne this year, there will be a session entitled "The Script Bowl", in which JRuby, Groovy, and Scala will face off on a series of challenges. I suggested that the list of challenges include a range of things each of our language communities could try to implement, and this is the list they came up with. I'm looking for help on these three, so I can show off JRuby's potential and give whoever implements the best example a nice plug and a t-shirt.

So let me repeat that as a call to action: Help implement these and the ones chosen for the session will earn a t-shirt and a plug on stage by me. Fair enough?

Here's the list:

#1 - Client Application

Write a simple, read-only Twitter client as a desktop app.
The Twitter API is documented at http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/web/api-documentation.
User provides twitter email address and password , then browses friends and their statuses.
User can also filter content based on plain text or a regexp. (Our users are geeks.)
Your choice whether to use the JSON or XML output from Twitter.

#2 - Web Application

As a database, we'll use the "world" sample database from MySQL (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/world-setup/en/world-setup.html).
The Web Application lets a user browse countries, sorting them using different criteria (e.g. population or GNP), and select cities and display them on a map using one of the many map widgets around, e.g. Google (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/).
For geocoding you could use e.g. http://worldkit.org/geocoder/rest/.

#3 - Free round

Up to you. Show us something your language can do better than any other! But again, be concise.

So obviously #1 would be a GUI thing, probably using one of the frameworks available for JRuby. And #2 is going to be a Rails app. At the moment, I think any of Jeremy Ashkenas's ruby-processing demos would be an easy add for the script-bowl, but if anyone wants to try to top them go for it. I'd especially like to see something JavaFX-like, with nice vector-drawn graphics and maybe a physics model. Make it pretty. Sound is good :)

Feel free to email me directly, but the JRuby user mailing list would probably be a better place to do it so we can all see it and discuss the entries that represent the best of JRuby.