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Originally Posted by ksafin
FYI Guys, this is my idea for my app
1) Have all current abilities of FRC Spyder (event lookup, match lookup, team lookup)
2) ...
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It's amusing to me to see you trivialize FRC Spyder into a single bullet point on your "my app is going to do all of these great things" list.
In order to be constructive, I'm going to offer this suggestion: please describe, in detail, how you will accomplish item number 1 on your list. While I'm sure many people see FRC Spyder as a trivial app (that's the point, to make it look simple & easy), there's
a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff going on. In order to duplicate this, you'll have to build all this backend stuff yourself. If you write up and post here how you plan to accomplish this, perhaps the community can point out areas that you haven't thought of or potential problems.
I have no issue with tackling ambitious projects, but I think it's a good idea to really know what you're in for. Realistically, if it were me I'd skip #1 on your list for now since there's a known working solution for this out there already. #2 and #3 are probably simpler than #1, really, so if I were you I'd try those first.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Basel A
FIRST's servers don't need the extra traffic and you almost certainly won't need results updated more than once per minute.
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Right sentiment, wrong number. There's
absolutely no reason to query FIRST's servers every minute. That's extremely excessive. Especially if you're thinking of doing it directly from your phone app (rather than once at an intermediate server that then serves that data to all of your phone users on your dime, like FRC Spyder does).
I'll also share another "tip" that I've had to learn the hard way: FIRST's webpages change more often than you think. Quite frequently someone at FIRST HQ goes in and edits the results page's HTML with Microsoft Word and then republishes that. Word does all kinds of nasty things to the formatting of those pages. I've seen other occasional random edits too. Bottom line, parsing FIRST's data automatically and reliably from their results websites is cumbersome and will take more work than you think.