Forum OpenACS Q&A: New Project using OpenACS

Thought I would let everybody know about a new project I am working on that is based on OpenACS.

I have been a long time baseball nut (as well as, a long time nut in general) and have had a strong interest in stats and sabermetrics. (If you have heard of the book Moneyball or The Numbers Game, both discuss it).

For years sites like:

• Baseball Reference
• RetroSheet
• The Baseball Databank

have offered up not only baseball stats, but the historical data for public use.

With the Febuary publication of Baseball Hacks by Joesph Alder I have finally decided to create a site I have been thinking about for serveral years. The site will display historical baseball stats, with data from The Baseball Databank, much like Baseball Reference. It will also collect data from in season games, and display box scores and well as in season leaders, etc. The stats will include many of the "sabermetic" stats as well as the standard stats.

I spend the past month looking at different approachs and software to use, but unlike many people, didn't move to somthing like Ruby on Rails and I fought off the desire to do the whole thing in FORTRAN, deciding on OpenACS.

You can see the very start of the project at http://fungoes.mek.cc.

At the end of the season I should have a 'Baseball Stats' package available for OpenACS, as well as started one for the NFL.

I hope to write some pratical documentation (using listbuilder, adding data to be searched that is not created with OpenACS -- ie: ~40MB of data from the Baseball Databank and ~200MB of data that will be in season box score information).

Mat,

Sounds like an interesting project. For awhile I had an OACS-based site for rankings and other statistics related to Richard's PbEM (a service for playing over 100 different abstract games like chess, go, etc.).

I took the site down when I switched hosting services and haven't yet gotten around to putting it back up (there was also a problem with the data collecting mechanisms which I hadn't solved). It's nor particularly stellar, but I can make the code available if you're interested.

And while we're mentioning Tufte (see other reply above), I have the beginnings of some code that lets you create sparklines in OACS. It makes use of the nsgd module which you can get from AOLserver's sourceforge repository (get the cvs version, the file release version is about 4 years out of date).

I intend to make that code public soon, but could send you a copy if it was at all interesting.

Matt