Testimonial: Sports community - game coordination website

My friends and I often get together to play a game of indoor soccer here in Denver, Colorado. Although we play regularly, for every game we need to confirm we have enough players, otherwise we have to call it off. So it goes like this: somebody (usually me :) sends out emails to all players on the morning of the game, then receives the replies and by mid-afternoon informs the others if the game is on. If it is, he books the court, pays the fees, then collects the money from the players after the game.

I often wondered how we could make our life easier and automate all this organizational stuff. Basically what we needed was a simple website where the players could self-register, see who is playing on a particular day, subscribe for a game, pay their share (for instance, by credit card) and get either confirmation or cancellation e-mails for each game.

I guess I could build this website myself. I am a software engineer with more than 20 years experience in system-level programming under various operating systems and working with large databases. However, I did not have to deal with web technologies closely, so I would have to learn Perl, PHP or a similar language to do that. Then I would have to design a database schema and write and test the code to implement all the features I wanted. When I thought about the time I would have to spend to build my website, somehow the whole idea did not look very appealing, even for a good cause. So, we continued to coordinate our soccer games manually.

Then I came across Aware IM, which was described to me as a high- level web application builder. I started playing with it to see what it can do. The first thing that struck me was the ease of creating objects and defining object relationships. I think this makes Aware IM a very good modeling tool, because it is so easy to create an object model and then test it in operation to see how it works. Another very interesting feature was the object rules. Initially they seemed very strange to me because there is no particular order of execution for rules of an object. I came to appreciate this design a little later when I realized that the whole system is data-driven rather than UI-driven and that all affected rules are executed automatically when their data changes. So I did not even have to write code in a traditional sense.

With this initial experience I looked up the documentation and found that Aware IM had built-in support of all functionality I needed for my soccer website like user self-registration, handling of emails and even credit card payments. I then decided to try to build my website in Aware IM. I copied some configuration bits from the sample applications (a very convenient option) and added the rest myself. To my surprise, the whole exercise took me less than two days. I don't think I could do it this quickly if I had to use a traditional programming environment, even after learning the language and APIs.

The next thing was to make my Aware IM-driven website accessible via the Internet. It turned out easier than I anticipated. All I had to do is to buy a static IP address from my ISP and register a domain name, which I then set to point to my static IP address. I used one of my spare computers to install Aware IM there and gave it the IP address. That was it - I was running my own web server with a database application on it! I gave the URL to the other players and asked them to use it. To my delight everybody liked it. Our website made it more convenient for the guys and especially for me.

Since it worked so well for us, I am now thinking of extending the functionality of my website so it is good not only for soccer, but for other sports too. Once it is ready I am going to host game coordinating websites for other people who play sport socially. They will not need to install any software or do any configuration work. Their website will run on my computer, they will just login and use it.

If anyone is interested in using a website for their games or sports, please send me an e-mail. You can look at my demo website at (TBA). I would also be happy to share my Aware IM configuration with those who want to design their own website for their sports.

My e-mail address is psmilanski@hotmail.com
Pavel Smelianski