RBIHF

RBIHF Website & Server

At the start of season 2013-2014 (September 2013), we launched the new front-end of the Royal Belgian Ice Hockey Federation (RBIHF) website. The RBIHF organizes all the ice and inline hockey competitions (IIHF rules).

Their previous website was already several years old (more than 8 years!). So I felt it was time to do a "small" layout and security upgrade. So during the summer I created the new front-end from scratch. There are several new features. E.g. league statistics, a shop, Facebook & Twitter integration, ... The backend remained more or less the same, but is scheduled to be upgraded as well during the next season(s).

In October we also changed to a new server, with a gigabit connection, 32 GB of RAM, Raid 1 SSDs, ... We also installed an Asterisk VoIP server. Asterisk is a free and open source framework for building communications applications.

Bachelor Thesis

We're allowed to choose our own topic for our bachelor thesis so I suggested the E-Sheet project so I could work on it and be doing something for my thesis. But the proposal was rejected, So I needed to pick something else or adjust the suggested topic. I choose for the second option. The final topic was titled "Interactive tabular data on touch devices".

For the implementation I used the Piccolo. Piccolo is a monolithic interaction toolkit, which allows to easily create a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI). A ZUI  is an UI where users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less, and browse through different documents.

I implemented several ways to enter data into the cells, the methods are divided in two main categories inline text editing and data entry using pop-ups. I also created two on-screen keyboards; a normal keyboard and a phone keyboard for screens with lower resolutions. The entered data is stored locally using a SQLite database.

The application was tested by several members of the RBIHF and they came to the following...

E-Sheet launch

This weekend (15-16 September) the ice hockey competitions of the Royal Belgian Ice hockey Federation (RBIHF) start, this is an important moment for the E-Sheet project.

For those who don't know it yet I created the E-Sheet application for the RBIHF. The main purpose of the application is to make the administration of the games easier and faster. The biggest improvement is that the game sheets don't have to be written down and reentered afterwards on the RBIHF website, by using the E-Sheet the data is only entered once and synchronized with the RBIHF servers. Another positive note is that there is less change of cheating; e.g. adding players after the game has started.

In addition to the program I also build a website. The website runs on Drupal 7 and is multilingual there are three languages available; English, Dutch and French. The website consists out of several useful features for the users of the E-Sheet; e.g. Help pages, download page, known issues. For more information on the website check it out or take a look at it's project page.

Website E-Sheet

This website has been created for the E-Sheet project, using Drupal 7. I created the website in addition to the application for a few reasons:

  1. So people can easily keep track updates of the application and download them. They will be notified every time a new update has been released.
  2. Allow people to submit problems and follow-up on them, for this feature is use the support module.
  3. I needed a place to store the help pages so they could be updated and translated easily.

The website can be viewed/used in three languages: English, Dutch and French. This is useful especially for the help pages, since not everyone understands English that good and Belgium is a multilingual country where the main languages are Dutch and French so they where added as well.

E-Sheet

During important games, like the semi-finals of the CIL-Cup, the board of the Royal Belgian Ice Hockey Federation (RBIHF) saw the scoreboard that I created. Afterwards they contacted me and asked if I wanted to make an application for the federation, which would work for Ice- and Inline hockey.

The application represents an electronic sheet (E-Sheet). The E-Sheet contains all the info about a certain game like goals, penalties, players, referees, ... You can find an example in attachment. The example was created on the website of the federation and all the data was entered into the website. As you can imagine this requires a lot of time. To solve this problem we started this project..

The project consists of a few components, the main component is of course the E-Sheet. Around this, a scoreboard is build like the other scoreboards I already created.

For more information about the project visit the e-sheet website.

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