Some great incoming topcoder-greed features

So Greed is a topcoder Arena plugin that is very customizable (And I mean, very customizable).

When I started using these plugins I took advantage of its github to provide patches and suggestions. This helped shivawu implement some wonderful features that will make Greed 2.0 a plugin with unprecedented power (I think).

Custom templates

In the current stable version, there are 3 templates: source, tester and unit tests (optional for Java and C#). The 2-3 templates are used by Greed to generate the source and unit test files. The templates use a language of their own that is very powerful. So powerful that implementing python support almost didn't need much modification to the plugin itself, just the creation of templates for python and an update to make the plugin use them.

Why stop there, though? The new idea is that you can, define custom templates. Any template for any kind of file in addition to the source and test ones. The plugin will use its configuration to read a template and put the generated contents in some location that depends on contest name and problem name. Why is this important? Well, it adds plenty of options that weren't there before. After some tweaking I was able to customize greed to generate ACM-style input and output files and a source code file that takes input and generates output ACM style.

This is the input file generated for FoxAndGo3:

6

3
o.o
.o.
o.o

3
...
.o.
...

5
xxxxx
xxoxx
xo.ox
xxoxx
xxxxx

5
.xox.
.o.ox
x.o.o
ox.ox
.ox..

5
o.o.o
.ox..
oxxxo
..x..
o.o.o

3
...
...
...

But I really didn't want these input/output files, I like my meta testers just fine. However, this feature is also helpful for other things. How about automatically creating a project XML file for your favorite IDE's ? Or a build file for whatever build system you have? Separating tester and source code. Whatever you need you can now do it.

Problem statement HTML

The first good use for the custom templates is that, just by adding some info from the problem statement to the template engine. The plugin can now generate problem statement HTML files from a template. Because it is a template, there is plenty of flexibility in regards to the format of the problem statement. The default looks like this:

There are plenty of uses for saving the problem statements in files. If the internet goes down during the contest, you can pretty much still work in the problem - You can read the problem and the source code is in an external file.

After generation hooks

My favorite new feature is, however, the "After Gen Hook" as it makes everything work great now. You can tweak configuration so, whenever Greed finishes generating a file from a specific template, it runs a custom command. Whatever command you need.

In my case, I tweaked Greed to make it automatically open source code files in jEdit, and opens the problem statement in Firefox. Manually opening the generated source code files in jEdit was an annoying bottleneck.

How to get the features

They are currently in a test branch and are still in development. But if you want to give them a try, just get the contents of the tmpl-seq branch from their github. The command to build a jar file from the new sourcecode is ./gradlew fatjar.

The new configuration options are not documented, so you will need to take a look to at the default.conf file in the source/main/resources folder and do some reverse engineering.