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newtoon – new tournament organizer over network

Yes, finding a suitable acronym for this piece of software Georg, Wolfgang and I have been working on since January proved a first challenge. About 350 person-hours and >500 commits to our svn repository later we’ve completed what might well become the backbone of most future YPT competitions.
Newtoon replaces the old java software Georg wrote about a decade ago, countless excel-sheets former LOCs have used and adds many new features:
Fight assistants will have their own account and can log-in from any internet-enabled computer (in Germany pre-configured Laptops will be provided and ready in each fight room). It will allow them to quickly select their room and round and start entering jurors’ grades. Fight-preview sheets will be generated automatically according to the IYPT regulations. As soon as an administrator approved the input grades, the results will immediately be available online. Once the tournament has started, you’ll find all results and previews here: http://results.iypt.org/IYPT2012/ .
Additionally the system will provide the IOC and LOC with valuable tournament statistics that will help them to further evaluate current scoring guidelines.
That all might sound simple, but doing it right proved challenging. There’s client- and server based validation of any user input, different caching strategies e.g. of results to keep the load on the server low, user authentication with different roles to separate fight-assistants and tournament organizers. Finally there are more boring features like the import of names and schedules to our system but also quite tricky ones like concurrency issues that have to be dealt with, as potentially up to 20 users will input data in parallel.

So far it’s all looking good, we’re continuing to make some final design tweaks and the software was successfully tested at our local YPT.

If you’re a participant the main advantage is that you’ll be provided with more detailed fight results than ever before and faster than ever before.