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Originally Posted by piotrm
Ahh. The scrolling thing is really nice! How does this SOAP thing work? Where is the information comming from? Is it a bunch of dedicated people sitting in at the events and getting the information as the match results are shown? How often is it updated? Is it faster than the FIRST site?
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Well, to make a long story long....
Well, over the years it has changed. It used to be we typed in manually, but sometimes had an incorrect match detail or had the red and blue alliances' team #'s swapped. We made sure to mark the matches as "super-unofficial".
In 2002-2003 some events we were able to have the FIRST db automatically push results into the SOAP db. That was 100% accuracy, even if they had to re-score a match.
This year we're back to manual, but the events 108 attends I dedicate myself to make sure all results are dead-on accurate. In fact, in Florida there were instances where I had to call FIRST to note an issue with their calculations. One turned out to be a false alarm, the other something they needed to correct. Having the SOAP as backup, in the words of one FIRST Staffer, is 'soooo reassuring that we will have an accurate event. I feel safer with you guys here.'
With the FIRST "ambitious overhaul" of the scoring in 2004, any SOAP push was dead last on their to-do list. It's unfortunate because our output (the web pages) has been tested rigorously the last 4 years because we have had so much re-use. The 1st three weeks of regionals could have been "posted" instantly instead of in week 4. Part of the problem is FIRST FTP's a data file after every match. This is inefficient. Our web page is dynamic depending on the data in the database. A simple refresh always shows the latest data. The bad side is right now we removed/archived our 2003 data so our 2003 web pages sort of don't exist. (Correctable though)
There's more to say, but the event is about to start...
KA-108
