GameScores.info is a web based system, to keep track of game results and player stats for small office games. It is initially designed to keep track of Foosball scores.

This branch contains a rewrite of the Java+Wicket+MySQL implementation in frankbille/ScoreBoard, into a Google App Engine application, using Go language on the backend, to provide data to the front-end, through a REST api. On the front-end AngularJS is used, so most of the user interface is rendered in the browser, to minimize the hit on the server.

Basically because the hassle of deploying Java applications, when you want cheap/free hosting. This app is not meant for any commercial use but only for fun/recreational spare time in office spaces.

I think the idea of having a platform that automatically scales up and down, and handles the infrastructure for you, is very welcoming. It has some very strict rules that must be followed, but when you do a lot of best practices will also follow, making your application faster and more scalable.

It is still not my ideal backend, as there is still a lot of boilerplate to be done, when all I really want is to enforce what people can do server-side. Firebase is so far the best option, but doesn't allow server side code execution.

With the rewrite I had two criterias: Google App Engine and a JavaScript frontend. A third criteria quickly popped up, which was that new App Engine instances should start fast. With Java and Python, a cold boot is actually very slow, so the first request from a user will take 10-30 seconds, depending on how much needing to be done on startup. Go on the other hand, is a fully compiled binary, so a new instance is available in <500ms (I haven't seen it so slow yet, normally around 50-100ms).

So by choosing Go, I can deliver a page with data, within a second even if no instances is running. This is pretty amazing and is worth a try-out. I say this because I haven't decided 100% that I will use Go. It is a newer language, with syntax similar to C and with very few mature frameworks compared to Java or Python.

This is still new technologies for me, so I haven't figured out what the best stack is to develop this. I basically use a text editor (Atom in this case) to edit the JavaScript and Go files, and then run the Google App Engine development server to build/host the files, so I can continuously develop and test in a browser, without having to restart all the time.

The code is divided into 4 app engine modules:

• context
  • The module containing front-end and API for each created game scoreboard. It creates a namespace for each game scoreboard, based on the subdomain. So if the url is http://company.gamescores.info, then the namespace will be "company".
• default
  • The module containing front-end and API for the web page, where new game scoreboards can be created. It is the module that is activated when hitting http://gamescores.info.

See the issue list for details of what is needed to be done.

Licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 3.0