Due to the fact that I made quite a bit of progress with yesterday and this morning's back end implementation, I have decided to Start a small side project that I want to get going while I'm working on the Driver Tracker app. This might turn in to larger project at a later point if I can get some more developers who want to get involved.
On the boards.ie motorsport forum they run competitions where by the put up a multiple choice poll with predictions about an upcoming race. Each prediction will have a number of points associated with it depending on how likely it will be as an outcome. The points are added up for each person who takes part in the competition and they are added to that posters total in a google docs spreadsheet. Due to the large number of people participating in this competition the results collection can be quite a bit tedious and I have offered my services to build a tool to automate this process.
I plan to build a tool for crunching these results and outputting the results to some kind of readable file. The program will be run from the command line and will accept a URL of the poll results as a parameter, as seen here. The next parameter should be the number of predictions, and the following parameters should be the number of poll options for each prediction group. For example, if we had a poll where there were 4 predictions and the first prediction had 4 possible outcomes, the second had 2 possible out comes, the third also had 2 possible outcomes and the last option had 3 possible outcomes, the correct use of the tool should then look something like "java F1NumberCruncher http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/poll.php?do=showresults&pollid=20560 4 5 2 2 3".
I don't know how many other people might want to get involved, but once I have a beta version of this ill distribute it among the people who are in charge of updating the competition results and see if I can get another developer to try and do up a GUI for this or maybe work on exporting the data to a google docs exel format of some kind.
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