New project: Meet In The Middle

[Darryl Pierce]

Hi, all. I just recently joined the group. I wanted to announce a small project I've started on called Meet In The Middle [1]. The goal of the project is to produce a few commandline utilities to help Meet Manager and WinSwim (and other software) exchange data, as well as do external seeding, etc.. Currently I'm doing the basic grunt work portion of writing a set of APIs to load an SD3 file and then extract data from the individual records. I know there are going to be issues to handle WRT the Hy-Tek side of things: I've done a little research on how their HY3 and CL2 files are laid out, etc.

Anyway, I'm hoping that maybe some people here might be interested in participating and contributing some features to the project, as well as helping in the overall design of the APIs.

Thanks. :)

[1] http://github.com/mcpierce/MeetInTheMiddle

[Eddie Rowe]

What language?

[Darryl L. Pierce]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 07:02:01AM -0800, Eddie Rowe wrote:
> What language?

The main code is written in C. Depending on interest, though, I would
like to also provide language bindings (via Swig) for dynamic languages
like Python, Perl and Ruby.

--
Darryl L. Pierce <mcpi...@gmail.com>
http://mcpierce.fedorapeople.org/
"What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman?"

[Eddie Rowe]

I'm writing a bunch of stuff in Perl for my own project right now...

[William Arbaugh]

and I have some code in Python that we use to take a CSV from Google forms to input into meet manager for our annual High School meet.

I'll try and put it up for download in a few.

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[Darryl L. Pierce]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2014 at 01:28:58PM -0800, Eddie Rowe wrote:
> I'm writing a bunch of stuff in Perl for my own project right now...

Would you be interested in collaborating on C and bindings? At my day
job I do just that (maintain language bindings generated via Swig from C
and C++ libraries) so have experience with creating the bindings.

[Mason Hale]

I have a fair amount of Ruby code dealing with SDIF, HY3, EV3, HYV and CL2 formats. But sharing any code under a GPL license is problematic for us as it is created in support of a commercial product, SwimTopia.

If we can make the license work, we may be able to contribute some code. Otherwise, we'd be happy to share what we we've learned about the various file formats and how they get used in the wild. 

Philosophically, I believe it is in the best interest of teams and the swimming ecosystem as a whole to have data portability and easier interchange, to foster competition between solutions and avoid being locked in to any single product.

One thought that occurs to me is that it may be more convenient to provide an online service to teams to provide file conversion and validation without requiring a software install. That would avoid versioning issues and Mac vs. PC vs. Linux issues. Do this approach interest anyone else?

Best regards,

Mason 

Mason Hale

CEO & Founder

www.SwimTopia.com

(877) 856-2940 ext 701

Managing a swim team just got a whole lot easier

[Doug Pierce]

Mason-

Could you look at making just the Ruby parsing code related to reading those formats available via BSD or APL?  Even it it was just parsing code, that would be helpful.  

As a side note, your service looks interesting for a Y team my oldest daughter swims on (with a little over 100 swimmers).  I don't see any goal setting, trending/analysis, practice attendance or workout tracking that might be useful for coaches and athletes.  Are there API's available?  It might make it easy for someone to create mobile/tablet apps to allow parents or swimmers to see historical results and track progress.  Also, do you have any larger Y or well known USA teams/clubs that are using your software that are referencable clients?

Cheers,

-Doug  

[Mason Hale]

I'll review the code to see what parts we could extract under a BSD or APL license.

Some parts are more tightly coupled with our data model than others. Will need to review for the work to extract those bits and balance against the value of sharing the code.

At the most basic level, there's room for a general-purpose fixed width data format library, and then CL2, HY3 could be dialects on top of that.

The other piece of the puzzle is support for swimming specific data formats, especially swim times. 

Re: SwimTopia -- As you noticed, we don't yet have a practice/working tracking module, but that is on the road map for this year. 

We don't have any APIs available only because no one has asked for them. We'd be delighted to expose APIs if we thought they would be used.

The sweet spot for our product at the moment is rec/summer league teams. In addition, we have several high school and year-round club teams using SwimTopia around the country, but that is a market we are just starting to reach out to in then past few months. One customer has over 600 swimmers, but it's a summer league team, not a USA Swimming or YMCA team. We have very happy customers and are happy to provide references. I don't want to hijack this forum with a SwimTopia commercial, so if you'd like to learn more, please feel free to email me directly -- mason at swimtopia.com

Mason

-- 

Mason Hale

ma...@swimtopia.com

[William Arbaugh]

On Jan 6, 2014, at 6:12 PM, Mason Hale <ma...@swimtopia.com> wrote:

> If we can make the license work, we may be able to contribute some code. Otherwise, we'd be happy to share what we we've learned about the various file formats and how they get used in the wild.

This would be key. When I wrote the python code a few years back, I had to reverse engineer the formats. I also received a couple of good pointers privately from an individual at TeamUnify.

The first step should be documentation in my opinion.

[Mason Hale]

One thing to mention at the outset of this discussion is that the SDIF format does not contain the same level of detail and features as the HY3 format. So there certainly will be some HY3 files that cannot be represented at SDIF. Just off the top of my head, SDIF does provide support for diving events or non-traditional relays like butterfly or backstroke relays, or relays with more than 4 legs. This owes to the USA Swimming roots of the SDIF format. 

I know there is an newer XML-based SDIF format, but I have yet to see it used in the wild.

Mason

[Mason Hale]

Sure, there has  been some documentation shared on this forum in the past, and I would be happy to add to that.

Mason

[Mike Walsh]

There has already been a fair amount of work done on documenting the various Hy-tek files.  A while ago I gathered up everything I could find and put it all in one zip file:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jw5ivrm2o667hco/Hy-Tek_Docs.zip

A lot of this work was done by other people, I did some of the work documenting the relay records.

A Wiki or GirHub project might be the best way to collect all if this stuff in a single place.

I like the Visio template but I also realize not everyone has access to Vizio.

Mike

PS:  I have a fair amount of PHP code in my WordPress plugin for dealing with both SDIF and HY3 files.

Sent from my iPhone

[Christian Kaufmann]

I know there is an newer XML-based SDIF format, but I have yet to see it used in the wild.

There is Lenex, an XML based open format used in different countries in Europe since 1999. 

http://swimwiki.geologix.ch/index.php/swimrankings:Lenex

This format is far more complete than SDIF. The XML result files from omegatiming.com are in this format. And since the offiical FINA World Rankings are done with the US Swimming ranking database, even US Swimming can handle at least result files in this format.

We keep track of this documentation. We don't get payed for this by anybody. We offer the Splash Meet and Team Manager applications and the swimrankings.net service. All products support Lenex (and SDIF as good as possible) http://www.splash-software.ch. Therefore we have an interest in open exchange format standards.

cu Christian