In case you missed it, there is a Hackathon that is going on right now (the submission deadline is tomorrow so you still have time to throw a quick mobile project together).

As part of the Hackathon event in St. Louis last week I gave a brief presentation on how to quickly and easily add a RESTful JSON webservice to your modules, or even create a simple module to do this yourself. I have the source code for this presentation on Codeplex under the dnnweb project, http://dnnweb.codeplex.com/

So we’re getting down to the final hours before the Hackathon, and those of us attending are getting ready for our trips! Nik and I both arrive from California tomorrow afternoon, while Joe is coming into St. Louis earlier in the day.

Wednesday (the 18th, tonight, depending on when you read this) we will be broadcasting the Hackathon kickoff from St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group. You will be able watch the session live, or watch the recordings later on.

The Hackathon contest will run until the 25th, when entries are due. For all the details on the event itself check out the rules and other details posted on http://hackathon.in

The live broadcast and video playback will occur here on DotNetNuke.com.

Why should you enter the Hackathon, even if you aren’t there attending live? You can win some great prizes!

There will be more blog posts coming in the next few days from both Joe Brinkman and myself as we post more details about mobile development and DNN.

For now, if you need some project ideas, here are some that ANYONE can create a project for. Most of these things will need a web service created to expose this data, I’ll have examples for you to see how to easily do this later this week!

An app to review your website Site Log data

An app to monitor your Event Log

An app to access the DNN Dashboard (host)

An app that exposes a user’s “work” from the HTML module

An app to list of blog posts and comments for the DNN blog module

An app to read and post data to the DNN Forum module

An app to interact with any other DNN module!

Don’t let our suggestions limit you in anyway, they are by no means the only things you could develop, in fact we encourage you to think outside of the box, they are just there to get your gears turning on something for the contest. These apps don’t need to be highly complex either, just a simple mobile app to perform a function is fine.

We will be releasing a sample application here this week as well that does a few different things with DNN that I think you will find very cool! I know I’ve used it and it’s pretty damn sweet to see!

With the Mobile DotNetNuke Hackathon coming up in St. Louis next week Joe Brinkman and I are going to be blogging about how you can get started with doing some mobile development with DotNetNuke, that way you are prepared to enter the contest. If you win the contest you stand a chance at winning some cool prizes, so you better dust off your development chops and get started!

My first post is going to cover how to easily get started with Appcelerator’s Titanium, a tool from an open source company located not too far from DotNetNuke Corp’s headquarters here in the Bay Area in California. The Titanium project is a tool for packaging and deploying (and testing) mobile applications,  meaning you can develop an application that will work on IPhone or Android, and in future releases will include Blackberry. Besides mobile you can also develop desktop applications, but we’re going to stick with the mobile side of things for now.

If you haven’t been reading my blog lately (what’s the matter with you?) you may have missed the couple of blog posts about the upcoming St. Louis Day of .NET that is going on in St. Louis. If you’ve missed those posts, check them out.

In conjunction with that event (which is on a Friday the 20th and Saturday the 21st) we’ve been planning another event more specific to DotNetNuke in conjunction with the local user group. We are glad to announce the next DotNetNuke Hackathon. As with the previous Hackathon events (held in Orlando and Washington DC) we will be broadcasting this event live online, and encouraging people both in St. Louis and around the world to get involved.

This event will be held at the Steady Rain offices (a DotNetNuke Gold Partner) in St. Louis Missouri on August 18th, 2010 at 6pm. This event will be streamed live online, visible on the DotNetNuke Hackathon page so you don’t have to be local to be part of the presentation and event.

The basic premise of the Hackathon is this, we want to help stimulate your minds into doing some mobile development for DotNetNuke. To do that, we are going to be presenting a sample DotNetNuke mobile application, an application that will run on the Android Smartphone OS. We will be demonstrating how you can use some common development tools such as Appcelerator’s Titanium Developer to get up and running on developing mobile applications that interact with DotNetNuke and work on various mobile devices.

As with the previous two Hackathon’s there will be an associated development contest following the event on the 18th. We aren’t limiting you to any specific project type or platform for the contest, but do suggest that you develop an application for either Android, IPhone or Windows Phone 7 devices. What your application does is completely up to you, the idea behind a Hackathon is to create a quick application that is easy to build and shows off unique functionality. You don’t have to be one of the top notch developers in the DNN community to enter or even win, so start thinking of ideas for your project, there’s no reason you can’t start on the development right now.

We will be announcing more details on the contest here in the next few days.

Prior to the Hackathon myself and Joe Brinkman will be blogging to get you up to speed before the event on mobile development, highlighting some of the tools you can use. We are also going to be blogging about some potential project ideas for those of you who might need some inspiration to create an entry for the Hackathon contest. We will also likely be posting some sample web services for a few key DNN datasets that you might find useful in your applications, as well as highlighting how you can use other tools such as iWeb to interface with DNN data from a mobile device.

Stay tuned as we get more information together on the Hackathon page here on DotNetNuke.com

Right now here are some of the pertinent details

Topic: Mobile DotNetNuke

Date: August 18, 2010

Time: 6pm

Location: Steady Rain Offices, 716 Geyer Avenue, Suite 400 St. Louis, Missouri 63104-4073 (map)

Contest submission deadline: TBD, likely 8/26/2010

Prizes: To be announced