Integration with the AGA TD file
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#5 Integration with the AGA TD file
The AGA provides a TD file with a list of every Go player who has ever registered with the AGA, their rank, and when their membership expires. If we let TDs import the file we could supply type ahead to finish people's names. Then we could fill in their rank and AGA number. We could also warn the TD if the players AGA membership had expired.
Since the AGA TD list is at a well known URL in XML (http://www.usgo.org/usa/tdlist.xml) we could make this a one-click type of operation if the user was online. We also need to let them import the file from their local file system if they are offline.
The one issue here is performance. The AGA TD list is pretty large and doing live search might be a little slow. We'll need to do a little testing. If it is too slow one solution might be to integrate a light weight SQL database like HSQL. It would make our download larger, but it is a single JAR file.
Yeah I think HSQL is likely to be the way to go. Ideally we should have this be fast enough to do type-ahead suggestions for player entry, and auto-populate the name from the ID or vice-versa...
Also having a persistent db store can allow us to retain the list. Unlike Win-TD's access database, we can send this one along in our app so the user never knows it. (I've done this one before).
I think the app should check for web access every time it starts and silently update the list without bothering the user unless a connection is not available. (at which time it should warn them once that the TD file is a cached copy downloaded on XXXX
That is a good idea. I just finished a project with HSQL and Hibernate that worked like this. I also did a project a little while ago making threaded HTTP connections in Java. We can steal the code from there. http://www.zackgrossbart.com/hackito/load-tester
I was thinking of this actually,
http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client/index.html
Though perhaps that's overkill since there's no need for cookies or authentication, or to submit a POST request... Unless there's a redirect involved in which case we may want the HTTP client again...