[CompInaBox-discuss] Fall semester update on CIB...

[Eric D N. <nie...@MI...>]

Its been a busy semester for CompInaBox hosting; while development has gone in
short bursts.

Ily from the Georgetown University ballroom team has come on board as a
developer and has already made several extremely useful contributions in
multiple areans: packaging/documentation, S3 scrutineering export support, and
making good suggestions for improving the comp admin areas.  I look forward to
his continued involvement.

I was making a lot of progress at the beginning of the semster with a new
infrastructure/code architecture that would migrate the SlidingDoors to a Front
Controller/MVC architecture.  The current system is more of a Page
Controller/Transaction Script model that's been verging on dissolving into
spaghetti code as more and more options have been added for different
competitions.  I've had to put this work on hold for the regular competition
support.  If there is interest, I'll branch the code and commit the work in
progress for others to review and/or help -- its currently non-working.  If you
want to hear more about it, please follow up with an email to the list.

The result tracker seems to be very popular; in terms of page views it catching
up with the individual competition's registration pages.  I've loaded just
about a full year worth of new england college competition data and hope to
work backwards as time permits.  I should be able to reach back to about 2002
with at least some of the competitions.  There are a few issues, like Novice is
completely ignored, but its not a huge deal.

The new password system for the regular SlidingDoors accounts is in operation
and generally has been behaving -- two large bugs that had been catching a lot
of people were recently fixed after an outstanding bug report from the Caltech
competition organizers.   One was the dreaded "intrusion attempt detected" --
this was caused by a recently added table that lacked a primary key
specification; I'm not sure how I left it off, but....  The other was one cause
of the "Should Never Happen" bug -- this was a timing-bug where a rapid
insert-delete pair confused the audit tables and rejected the update, however
the second half of the update succeeded.  I've added a forced delay into the
system but I'll need to investigate whether I need a different foreign key
action or a full transaction warpper to fix it properly.

The team admin features for bulk registration aren't getting strong use.  They
are missing two required features and have one layout bug that needs fixing
before I push them harder on the teams.  The missing features are a cron based
process for pulling "regular" registrations into the team system and
enforcement of the competition registration rules (enforced in SlidingDoors,
currently bypassed in bulk registration).  The layout bug in MSIE causes a huge
empty space in the screen, I think do to different CSS handing of nested
"clear"s.

Finally, the extensive use of the comp admin areas by the DCDI organizers has
identified a strong need for a complete reorganization of the admin section,
including moving some of the calcuation into the database.  This work is yet to
start, but hopefully will have some detailed discussion soon.

Eric