the top 22 applications for this year's 48-hour Rails Rumble development competition have been selected

The event, which took place between the 22nd and 23rd of August (a weekend), has come and gone, leaving 22 development teams atop a pile of 237.

Hi I'm, an "internet nametag" application, took first place, how's my code?, a git-based collaborative workflow application took second, and Tablesurfing, described in more detail below, took third.

You can view the remainder of 22 applications on The Rails Rumble Leaderboard.

Of the 237 that entered, only 137 turned in working applications at the end of the 48 development hours allotted under the competition's rules. You can view a list of all submitted applications here, or search through them here.

For those of you unfamiliar with Rails Rumble, the site's homepage describes the competition as:

...an annual 48 hour web application development competition in which teams of skilled web application developers get one weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that they can, using the power of Ruby and Rails.

tablesurfing

Of the winners, my favorite application, placing third overall, was Tablesurfing by Gorillaminds, a couchsurfing-like application intended to help local diners and chefs alike find each other and share a meal with a friendly stranger. As a patron of couchsuring I can attest to the utility of this particular type of application, and think that I might use it myself in the near future.

lowdown

Another neat application was Lowdown, developed by Microbrew Certified Partners. Lowdown lets developers, project managers and investors collaborate on project workflow by establishing Test-Driven-Development milestones and tasks with Cucumber. Lowdown also allows you to set hourly rates and estimates for given tasks, giving investors an idea of the cost required for implementation of a specific feature. As a developer, I found this very neat, and more appealing than many of the other arbitrarily social apps that littered the top-22.

All and all there seemed to be a reasonably useful gamut of applications produced by this year's Rumble, most a testament to the sheer horsepower and agility that Rails provides. My only regret is that I didn't register in time.

Maybe next year...