libtour 0.9.6 review
Downloadlibtour is a generic tournament processing library
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libtour is a generic tournament processing library. The rules, participants, schedule, and results of a sporting tournament can be defined in the Scheme programming language and given to the library as input.
A CLI application is provided as a reference client implementation. See http://freshmeat.net/projects/qtour/ for a Qt-based client.
ach sporting tournament consists of a number of stages, examples of stages are Preliminary Stage, Quater Finals, Finals.
Each stage includes one or more group; for instance a Preliminary Stage may contain groups A, B, C, and D; Finals may contain a single group of two teams that compete for the winner's title.
Each group has two or more teams. Before the tournament starts, only groups of the first stage know their teams. By the completion of the first stage it is usually possible to programmatically determine teams that advance to the following stage, based on their results, and so on for all stages.
Given rules of the tournament (points allocated to a team in a game, as well as sorting criteria for table of standings), initial teams and game schedule it is possible to interpret its results inside a computer program.
Here are some key features of "libtour":
simple protocol to communicate with the library through request/reply objects
queries of data coming from the Scheme definitions (game, team and team result fields, date format etc)
queries of interpreted data (table of standings, game schedule with results, teams etc)
notion of the "local team ID" that allows definitions of future stages without knowing real teams
ability to query the information for stages whose teams hasn't been determined yet
support for different group formulas (round robin, game count, playoffs)
support for excessive games (those in the schedule but not necessary to play, like in a playoff stage)
support for carry-forward game results, and incidentally, predefined games results
game schedule verification
support for dynamic creation of (parts of) the game schedule
support for sorting conflicts within a group (when the rules fail to determine exact team positioning) and providing manual resolution for such conflicts (updated in ver. 0.9.2)
summary groups (one per stage) provided by the library
support for creating custom groups on the fly using team and/or game filtering procedures defined in Scheme; information on the interface of available filters (since ver. 0.9.0)
loading and interpreting more than one tournament at a time
saving and restoring tournament state
comprehensive (?) documentation
Limitations:
currently only two-player (not multi-player) games are supported
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