tjeuten

Hey,

due to populare request, I’ve now added the seasons from 1990 to 1999 to the Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Truck Series. Please let me know if you experience any drop of performance, as the database now holds a bit more data.

Meanwhile I’m still working on automating the dataparsing, and when that’s done you will be able to use all seasons from all available series again.

Stick around !

Mathieu

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

The new version is now compatible with the recent updates over at racing-reference.info.

Grab it from the NRatings page.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on v3.0 which will have an extra dataserver as layer between the clients on the users machines and the racing-reference.info website. This way, when RR does another website update, I’ll only have to update the dataparsing code on the server, while this will be transparent to the clients and no new clientversion is needed. The two minor drawbacks will be that there won’t be a local database anymore, so you’ll have to be connected to the Internet every time you wish to update your ratings to the latest real life data. The second one is that the program will probably be slightly slower. But I think the advantage has the upper hand here over these 2 small disadvantages.

Still got some work to do on that though so it won’t be for any time soon. I hope RR sticks to their format now for at least a good couple of weeks, to give me time to finish my new structure.

TJ