3 replies to this topic

[Junee]

Ok I’ll try to explain my needs the best I can. Basically I need to find out what language I should be coding in to complete the following:

A quick overview; I want to keep statistics on a local sports competition. I’ll need a place to keep player profiles, a program to enter the statistics and then spit them out as spread sheets or tables and then a place where I can write queries & equations for all the statistics collected.

1. I need a database where I can store player profiles just basic details, Age, place of birth, club etc.
2. I need a program where I can enter the statistics as I’m watching the recorded version of the game. So basically at the start I can select players in their teams from their profiles and then enter the stats play by play. At the end it should hopefully spit out a spread sheet or table for the team stats, all of the players stats grouped and individual stats.
3. I need all the spread sheets to be linked to one another as I’ll need to do lots of queries trying to find averages and far more complex equations.

I’d say I’m pretty experienced in Excel but realise its limitations, I’m talking about 400 players, 200 games and multiple seasons. This is surely bigger than anything excel can handle (certainly without a lot of hassle anyway).

So back to my question (hopefully I haven’t lost you). What code should I be looking to use and are there any programs that already exist that I should look in to (either as the sole program or that I can use in some of the steps)? As this is a hobby I don’t really care either way, efficiency and accuracy is the most important things for me.

I’m guessing most people will say C++ but I wanted to just double check before I started to purchasing books etc.

Thanks in advance.

[lespauled]

From your project needs, I think the language can be anything you'd like to pursue. Although it may sound complicated from your perspective, it's really straightforward in the computer programming world.

I guess the first things to ask is what operating system are you developing on, I'm guessing Windows since you mentioned Excel. Secondly, what is your target (web application, windows application)? What tools do you have available (Visual Studio, etc.)? These are the things that need to be answered to help you on your way.

[gregwarner]

My suggestion is to use MySQL as your database. It's free and easy to learn. You will be writing all your SQL queries to "spit out" your tables and spreadsheets yourself, and SQL is a VERY powerful language for doing exactly what you're wanting to do.

As for the GUI, I would personally do this in Java if it were up to me, however, I've written a C front-end for MySQL before, and it wasn't significantly any more difficult. There exist many different database connection libraries (sometimes called database drivers) for all the different languages out there; some even come with them built in (PHP comes to mind). It's up to you as to which language you use to construct the GUI front end. Use whatever you're most familiar with. As I said, it's in the SQL queries you'll be writing where all the real power is.

Tip: You can export query results from MySQL into CSV files (Comma Separated Value), which can be opened directly in Excel! That's what I used to do to make spreadsheets from my reports. :)

[WingedPanther]

You could (shudder) do 90% of this in Access, with Excel linking to it. You're actually talking about a fairly small amount of data, and Access integrates nicely with Excel.