Universal Scouting Backend

[lemiant]

Many teams (and other organizations) have attempted to create a scouting database which can be used by multiple teams in order to provide scouting information to everyone. One of the setbacks that these attempts have faced is that they are unable to use information gathered by other efforts and thus must start their information from scratch. My objective is not to create another scouting interface, but instead to create a united database, which other organizations can write clients for. This will make creating a scouting system much easier, because it can be easily populated with a wealth of information. Below is my proposed implementation (Be forewarned I am going to assume you have a basic knowledge of web design):

The site would be based around a MySQL database. The database would have at least two tables (matches and teams), but likely far more. Each table would have many pre-defined fields (i.e. participants, scores, video) a comments field and a custom data field. Teams would be allowed to submit information to the database by POSTing JSON format information to an acceptor page. Information would be retrieved by POSTing a query to a querier page that would run the query with a user that could only select, and then parse and return the results. Information could be further processed by the client.

What do you think? Would you be interesting in working on this project?

[davidthefat]

Now, how would a team gain access to the internet during a competition?

[lemiant]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

Now, how would a team gain access to the internet during a competition?

Good catch, obviously I haven't quite thought this all the way through . How are Cheesy Scout or TBA used? I guess you could make a little shell that ran a local instance of the code (or part of it) on a host computer, and received and sent updates when it got back to the internet. Not very elegant, but it could be doable.

[slijin]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

Now, how would a team gain access to the internet during a competition?

I brought in a wireless card for our team to use, so as to stream live feeds of the competition in the pits for those of us on pit duty (and those in the pits around us! our neighbors in the Galileo pits were our opponents in Gali quarters :3)

[lemiant]

Originally Posted by slijin

I brought in a wireless card for our team to use, so as to stream live feeds of the competition in the pits for those of us on pit duty (and those in the pits around us! our neighbors in the Galileo pits were our opponents in Gali quarters :3)

Digressing from the main point of the thread: At 100 bucks every team should buy one of these.

Originally Posted by lemiant

Digressing from the main point of the thread: At 100 bucks every team should buy one of these.

Where can a team get one of these?

[lemiant]

Originally Posted by SuperNerd256

Where can a team get one of these?

http://www.orderrogers.ca/rocket/stick
Its $130 for the stick and approx. 10 cents per MB.

Alternatively if you have an iPhone you can use its internet. (I did that )

[BigJ]

I feel like if it was open to all POSTs that there would be problems with overlapping data and stuff. perhaps have a team volunteer to input a specific regional and given them a key to input data for that regional with. Maybe provide an input page tailored to the game, in case a regional doesn't have any volunteer teams that have the ability/knowledge/time to make an input client which could turn input into JSON.

But I do like the idea of web bindings to a database that other applications can get raw data from and use.

On another note I worked on a web app this quarter for my distributed computing class where I used Amazon SimpleDB and it worked pretty fast (SimpleDB is a bit different from the mySQL databases because it is nonrelational). The app could do OPR for a 52 team event from scratch in around 3 seconds and could most likely be made faster (It was very unpolished so it's not anywhere on the actual internet). I might remake it this summer. The main problem is that to finish the assignment faster I do calculations on the server side, where I should really do them on the client side. I was just too lazy to find a javascript library to do matrix math and without doing calcs on the client side I didn't have to use javascript at all.

[lemiant]

Originally Posted by BigJ

I feel like if it was open to all POSTs that there would be problems with overlapping data and stuff. perhaps have a team volunteer to input a specific regional and given them a key to input data for that regional with. Maybe provide an input page tailored to the game, in case a regional doesn't have any volunteer teams that have the ability/knowledge/time to make an input client which could turn input into JSON.

But I do like the idea of web bindings to a database that other applications can get raw data from and use.

On another note I worked on a web app this quarter for my distributed computing class where I used Amazon SimpleDB and it worked pretty fast (SimpleDB is a bit different from the mySQL databases because it is nonrelational). The app could do OPR for a 52 team event from scratch in around 3 seconds and could most likely be made faster (It was very unpolished so it's not anywhere on the actual internet). I might remake it this summer. The main problem is that to finish the assignment faster I do calculations on the server side, where I should really do them on the client side. I was just too lazy to find a javascript library to do matrix math and without doing calcs on the client side I didn't have to use javascript at all.

It could have defUlt client, so that not everyone would have to write their own, but I would like to retain the ability to allow other clients to add to it.

[BigJ]

Yeah, I just meant a web form that on submit would send the web request with properly formatted JSON.