Today we launched an interesting experiment here at Appcelerator and I’m curious to see how it plays out.

Certain technologies are such that description is a poor substitute for personal experience (think Tivo or iPod).  This is often the feedback we receive from people who decide to build something with our Appcelerator RIA + SOA platform (e.g. “wow, this is so friggin elegant!”).  But the investment that someone must make to achieve that epiphany is non-trivial because they must step back to grasp basic Appcelerator concepts like our message-oriented architecture and our web expressions (just as they would with any other framework).

To lower that barrier we have asked members of our community to submit screenshots of their most boring (yet critical) web 1.0 business application along with a description of the functionality provided.  We will select a few of the submissions and rebuild that user-interface entirely as a rich internet application based on Appcelerator.  Best of all, it’s absolutely free.  Often times what a developer needs to convince their management about the business case for RIA is a functional prototype that allows them to really experience the enhancement it can bring.  Because our technology completely decouples the user interface from the server-side infrastructure the resulting prototype can be used as the actual user-interface for their RIA upgrade if they decide to use Appcelerator.

While the contest is formally named “WebApp Facelift” we’ve been referring to it around the office as “Pimp my WebApp”!  Click here to submit your web application for consideration.

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