SoL 3.0a3

Carrom tournaments management

This project contains some tools that make it easier the organization of a championship of Carrom.

The main component is a Pyramid application serving two distinct user interfaces:

1. A very light, HTML only, read only view of the whole database, where you can actually browse thru the tourneys, seasons and players. You can see it in action on the public SoL instance at http://sol.metapensiero.it/lit/.

2. A complete ExtJS based desktop-like application, that expose all the functionalities described below in an easy to manage interface, that you can try out visiting http://sol.metapensiero.it/.

Attention!

SoL 3 requires Python 3.3 or higher, it does not work with Python 2

Brief history

Scarry was a Delphi application I wrote years ago, with the equivalent goal. It started as a “quick and dirty” solution to the problem, and Delphi was quite good at that. It has served us with good enough reliability for years, but since programming in that environment really boring nowadays, there’s no way I could be convinced to enhance it further.

SoL is a complete reimplementation, restarting from scratch: it uses exclusively free software components, so that I won’t be embaraced to public the whole source code.

Goals

These are the key points:

1. Multilingual application

   Scarry spoke only italian, because the i18n mechanism in Delphi (and in general under Windows) sucks. Most of the code was written and commented in italian too, and that makes it very difficult to get foreign contributions

2. Real database

   Scarry used Paradox tables, but we are in the third millenium, now: SoL uses a real, even if simple and light, SQL database under its skin

3. Easy to use

   The application is usually driven by computer-illiterated guys, so little to no surprises

4. Easy to deploy

   Gods know how many hours went in building f*cking installers with BDE goodies

5. Bring back the fun

   Programming in Python is just that, since the beginning

High level description

The application implements the following features:

• basic tables editing, like adding a new player, opening a new season, manually tweaking the scores, and so on;

• handle a single tourney

  1. compose a list of competitors: usually this is just a single player, but there are two people in doubles, or more (teams)

  2. set up the first turn, made up of matches, each coupling two distinct competitors: this is usually done randomly, but the arbiter must be able to manually change the combinations

  3. print the game sheets, where the player will write the scores

  4. possibly show a clock, to alert the end of the game

  5. insert the score of each table

  6. compute the ranking

  7. print the current ranking

  8. possibly offer a way to retire some competitors, or to add a new competitor

  9. compute the next turn

  10. repeat steps c. thru i. usually up to seven turns

  11. possibly offer a way to go back, delete last turn, correct a score and repeat

  12. recompute the ranking, assigning prizes

• handle a season of tourneys

  • each tourney is associated to one season

  • print the season championship

• data exchange, to import/export whole tourneys in a portable way

Installation and Setup

The very first requirement to install an instance of SoL on your own machine is getting Python 3.3[1]. This step obviously depends on the operating system you are using: on most GNU/Linux distributions it is already available[2], for example on Debian and derivatives like Ubuntu the following command will do the task:

$ apt-get install python3.3

If instead you are using M$-Windows, you should select the right installer from the downloads page on http://www.python.org/. Most probably you need to install also the Visual Studio 2010 Express, or alternatively just its runtime.

To be able to produce readable PDF you need to install also the DejaVu fonts. As usual, on GNU/Linux it’s a matter of executing the following command:

$ apt-get install fonts-dejavu

or equivalent for your distribution, while on M$-Windows you need to download them and extract the archive in the right location which usually is C:\Windows\Fonts.

Easiest way, SoLista

The easiest way is using SoLista, a buildout configuration that will perform most of the needed steps with a few clicks: this is particularly indicated if you are not fluent with the command line interface of your operating system.

Follow the hopefully clear enough steps in SoLista’s README.

The manual way

1. Install SoL using pip:

   pip install SoL

   that will download the latest version of SoL from PyPI and all its dependencies as well

2. Install ExtJS 4.2.1:

   python3.3 -m metapensiero.extjs.desktop

3. Create a standard config file:

   soladmin create-config config.ini

   and edit it as appropriate

4. Setup the database:

   soladmin initialize-db config.ini

5. Load official data:

   soladmin restore config.ini

6. Run the application server:

   pserve config.ini

7. Enjoy!

   firefox http://localhost:6996/

   or, for poor Window$ users or just because using Python makes you happier:

   python -m webbrowser http://localhost:6996/

Development

The complete sources are available on Bitbucket and can be downloaded with the following command:

git clone https://bitbucket.org/lele/sol

If you are a developer, you are encouraged to create your own fork of the software and possibly open a pull request: I will happily merge your changes!

You can run the test suite with:

python3.3 setup.py nosetests

I18N / L10N

Currently SoL is translated in english and italian. If you know other languages and want to contribute, the easiest way to create a new translation is to create an account on the Weblate site and follow its translators guide.

Feedback and support

If you run in troubles, or want to suggest something, or simply a desire of saying “Thank you” raises up, feel free to contact me via email as lele at metapensiero dot it.

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[1]

As of this writing I’m using version 3.3.5rc2, but the final release should come out very soon.

Version 3.4 is currently in beta, and should not be used because some third parties components needs tiny adjustments.

[2]

In fact it may even be already installed!

Changes

3.0a3 (2014-03-06)

• Tweak the deployment infrastructure

• Change package description to improve the chance it gets found

• Some work on the user manuals

3.0a2 (2014-03-04)

• Fix various deploy related issues

3.0a1 (2014-03-03)

• Let’s try the release process!

Version 3

• Ported to Python 3.3 and to ExtJS 4.2

• Built on metapensiero.extjs.desktop and metapensiero.sqlalchemy.proxy

• Version control moved from darcs to git (darcs is beautiful, but git is more powerful and many more people use it)

• It tooks almost one year and more than 760 changesets (still counting!)…

Highlights

• Glicko2 ratings, with graphical charts

• Old championships are gone, old seasons has been renamed to championships

  People got confused by the overlapping functionality, old championships were an attempt to compute national-wide rankings: the new Glicko2-based ratings are much better at that

• Augmented players information to fit international tourneys requirements, clubs may be marked as federations

• Easier interfaces to insert and modify

• Easier way to upload players portraits and clubs logos

• Hopefully easier installation

• Better infrastructure to accomodate database migrations

• Simpler way to detect potential duplicated players

• Most entities carry a GUID that make it possible to reliably match them when imported from a different SoL instance

• Players merges are tracked and distribuited to other SoL instances