Ask HN: What dev stack should I learn for making scoring apps for weird sports?

1 points by Kluny 9y ago ↗ HN

I made an app for my polo league for scoring tournaments. http://www.sh2.radarhill.net/XpeariMints/swiss-rounds/tournaments You can read about it here - http://rocketships.ca/blog/recursing-for-bike-polo/ - where I explain why I needed to build this in the first place, and some of the struggles I worked through.

Tl;dr: we wanted to maximize play time and fun factor for all teams, including the weaker ones, in a field where the skill level ranges from professional to absolute newbie, while still ensuring the the strongest team wins. No existing solution was quite right, so I built it myself.

It’s built on CakePHP. This did the trick, but the only reason I used Cake is because it’s the only toolset I know well and I needed to just get on with building the damn thing. Now that it’s done, I’m thinking about what I can do differently next time. It there might be other opportunities like this in the future, since this is the second time I’ve been asked to build a scoring application for a weird sport. Last time it was drift racing. I used Java and the Swing library, and I didn’t succeed. Picture the longest main() function you’ve ever seen….

Cake is better (and so am I, now), but it needs a web browser and connection to a server to run. The tournament takes place at an outdoor hockey rink and there’s not even electricity, let alone wifi. I got it to work locally off a USB drive on my buddy’s laptop, but there’s this process of firing up XAMPP, making sure apache and mysql are running, and navigating to localhost/app-directory/complicated-url in the browser. It’s not a tidy desktop application with a launcher shortcut like it should be. Plus, there’s all this Cake infrastructure that isn’t really needed, and a tremendous number of database calls that make it run more slowly than it should, considering that it’s just simple text and not that much of it.

What would you have used to build this? My first thought was VB, but I work from a Mac so perhaps not.