Archive for July, 2010

Appearently, Racing-Reference.info made another change to their results structure, which causes NRatings again to fail when trying to download the latest results. This has been their second change in a few weeks time now.

Therefore, I have decided not to release any new version until they keep their website structure stable for at least a couple of weeks.

However, I have been working on a complete changeover of the software lately. Let me try to explain what I’m doing :

Right now, the NRatings program has a local database, and when you click “Get Real Data For This Series”, it connects directly to the racing-reference.info website in HTTP, reads out the different race and raceresult pages, parses the data and stores it into the local database.

• Advantages:
  • The local database means almost immediate response when looking up data already stored in it.
  • NRatings can use this local database without the requirement of an Internet connection. Only when you want to download the most recent data, you need to be connected to the Internet.
• Disadvantages:
  • As the logic which converts the downloaded data to a database format resides on the NRatings client itself, every time racing-reference.info makes a structure change (which has been quite often lately), the logic has to be updated, which means a new release of NRatings is needed.

As this disadvantage outweighs the advantages, I’ve been working on a client/server model lately. The server will reside on my webhosting domain and will contain the logic for parsing the rr.info data into a database also residing on the server. The clients (= the NRatings programs you guys will install locally on your machines) will connect to this server and get the data directly from there. I also got rid of the local database on the client, which was in Firebird and caused some compatibility issues for a certain amount of users.

• Advantages:
  • As the parsing logic will now reside on the central server, if there is another structure update at rr.info, I will only have to update the server logic, and not the clients. This will result in you guys not having to download a new version, but rather just wait until I’ve finished updating the server, and you’re all good to go again.
  • As their won’t be a local database anymore, the download size of future releases will be much much smaller, which is good for the sake of my webhost bandwidth
• Disadvantages:
  • As the client will now draw its data live from the server, without storing anything locally anymore, the dataloading and conversion to ratings will probably be a tad slower, although I doubt it’ll be really significant.
  • For the same reason, each time you wish to rate your cars with real data, even for historic data like say 1980, you will require an Internet connection. But again, I doubt that nowadays there are still people which gaming machine is not permantly online, are they ?

I hope you are with me if I say that the new client/server system has a clear advantage over the current “client only” system, and that the small disadvantages can be disregarded.

Then the question that pops into all your minds is obviously … when ?

Well, I’m in the middle of coding things up and I’ve made good progress so far, but there’s still some way to go before I can bring this new system out. However, I hope to be able to release something in the next 2 or 3 weeks. But please don’t shoot me if it takes longer (it’s summer, and although I have no holiday plans yet, I might take a last minute decision to sail off anyway). If I see that it’ll really take too long before I can release this new system, I’ll make an effort in updating the “client only” version so you can carry on rating the old way. But for now I wish to focus all my coding efforts on the new system.

So please, bear with me and have a little patience. Meanwhile, you should be able to use the current version v2.5.3 which contains the data up until Loudon a few weeks ago.

If you have any questions regarding this announcement, I’ll be happy to answer it.

Meanwhile keep the racing going and have a great summer !

Mathieu