Tournament Pool and Bracket Tracker 0.4.4 review
DownloadTournament Pool and Bracket Tracker is a Java Servlet based generic game tournament pool bracket tracking application suitable especi
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Tournament Pool and Bracket Tracker is a Java Servlet based generic game tournament pool bracket tracking application suitable especially for the NCAA basketball championship tournament.
Features include bracket entering, multiple scoring systems, multiple users, groups, pools, etc.
Tournament Pool and Bracket Tracker contains everything you need to run a tournament pool.
It supports small groups or organizations who wish to provide an NCAA basketball tournament pool without a lot of administrative work in registering users or in calculating up-to-date results and possibilities.
Though it was built with the NCAA "March Madness" tournaments in mind, it should be able to handle other sport tournament pools that use straight forward brackets.
As an administrator, you will first log into the system like any other user. Any user can create a group and aministrate their own pool. A group is a set of players that play together in any number of pools.
Pool adminstrators can choose from many different scoring systems. Scoring systems can be set up dynamically in the database. When you set up a group, you have a choice. Either you can tell the users about the pool, and have them register, then notify you. You would then add the users to the group manually. This keeps membership totally within your control.
However, you can also create an invitation code. You'll then have an link to the system with that invitation code embedded. You can send this link to your users. When they click the link and login (with a possible detour through registration), they will be automatically added to your group.
They can then create their bracket and add it to a pool without your direct involvement. You do risk that the email gets circulated to others and people you don't intend to enter your group do.
Players can create as many brackets as they like, name them, leave them unfinished, come back to them later, etc. Players can add a bracket to a pool once the bracket is finished either from the bracket interface page or from the pool interface page.
Once a tournament is underway, users can keep track of their progress as the administrator for a tournament updates the results of games. Tournaments results are updated by the administrator with the same interface players use to enter their brackets.
Players are prevented from editing their brackets once it has been added to a pool that has a tournament underway. Tournament administrators can delegate the duty of keeping game results up to date to others if they aren't going to be around for some of the games via a simple interface.
This allows players to come into the system regularly during the tournament and check their results and the standings much quicker than your typical spreadsheet based systems. If something is updated wrong, the players will keep you honest. The results show current, remaining, and maximum available points.
Any user can inspect the other player's brackets in the pool. The brackets are presented with good picks in the green and bad picks in the red.
Limitations:
Right now, all of the bracket, tournament, and teams setup is done via SQL scripts. I typically am working on the scripts the night they are announced. The priority list for the user interface work so far has been first to make the player experience nice, second to make the in-tournament administration nice, and only third to make the tournament setup nice. Hopefully by the time March 2006 rolls around this third area will be improved.
At this point the bracket system won't handle 'highest seed meets lowest seed' type of brackets. Unfortunately, this rules out using this system for the NFL Playoffs for the time being. I've been working on this, but it is hard nut to crack.
Installation:
- Install MySQL and Tomcat
- Put the tournament.war file in the tomcat 'webapps' folder.
- To get the database ready, run the following commands from the mysql.exe tool in the following order:
. [path]configdb.sql
. [path]configncaa.sql
. [path]configncaa-teams.sql
. [path]configncaa-2004.sql (optional)
. [path]configacc.sql (optional)
. [path]configacc-2005.sql (optional)
. [path]configncaa-2005.sql
You need to grant privileges in mysql as well:
GRANT ALL PRIViLEGES ON *.* TO 'testuser'@'localhost'
IDENTIFIED BY 'testpw' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Make some tweaks to the [tomcat home]/conf/web.xml file. Uncomment the following:
< !-- The invoker servlet -->
< servlet>
< servlet-name>invoker
< servlet-class>
org.apache.catalina.servlets.InvokerServlet
< /servlet-class>
< init-param>
< param-name>debug
< param-value>0
< /init-param>
< load-on-startup>2
< /servlet>
and
< !-- The mapping for the invoker servlet -->
< servlet-mapping>
< servlet-name>invoker
< url-pattern>/servlet/*
< /servlet-mapping>
This enables the autoinvoker servlet, which maps from URLs to class names which happen to be J2EE servlet classes. Some people consider this a security risk, which is why it is disabled by default. I've never had an issue so long as I know all of the servlet classes I have in the system. This can be changed. If you consider it an issue, let me know via a feature request.
- Start MySQL and Tomcat
- Go to http://localhost:8080/tournament/
What's New in This Release:
This release sorts the brackets in a pool so that the brackets with the most points show up on top.
It also gives group administrators the ability to change a pool until there are brackets added to it.
This will help them correct mistakes.
Administration form based pages now put the focus on the first form element.
This should make administration faster to do.
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