Continuing our Social Developer theme, we're excited to announce a week long hackathon put on by the Oracle Social Developer Lab (OSDL). The event starts at JavaOne Oct 2nd and runs through Oct 9th. A winner will be announced and profiled in the following issue of Java Magazine.

What's it about?
The OSDL is on a mission to make social development easier for the Java community. You may have noticed the biggest social networks have created tools for Ruby, PHP, and other languages, but not as much for Java. We've decided to help fill the gap with a SocialLink social publishing library. You can learn more about it on Java.net. We're also interested in promoting other tools that facilitate social development such as DaliCore Framework. 

For our hack, you've got one week to leverage our library and/or DailCore to create a social app. The only rules are it must be a new application, and it must leverage one or both of these tools. 

How to submit
Create a project that uses either the SocialLink library or the DaliCore Framework to read or publish social data.

1. Upload your hack to a new project on java.net

2. Submit the URL to your java.net project through the project submission form on the Oracle Social Developer Community Facebook page.

Only projects that have been submitted to the Oracle Social Developer Community will be reviewed.  In addition to the review process, we'll be adding some projects to the SocialLink project as a "sibling" project.

Should you participate?
If you're a developer who aspires to integrate some social functionality into your Java application, then yes! 

How else can I participate with OSDL?
If you're not ready to participate in the hackathon but have ideas for how we can make social development easier for the Java community, come join our social developer community on Facebook.