FRC-DB Development¶

This site is for all things related to the development of FRC-DB, including background information, bug reports, feature requests, and other resources.

What is FRC-DB?¶

FRC-DB is a dynamic database of FRC teams intended to help with scouting by showing useful statistics for teams and events. It consists of:

• A Web Interface, to display information and statistics;
• A Crawler, to gather information from various sources;
• A series of Algorithms, to calculate the statistics;
• A Database, to store gathered information; and
• A public API to let others work with the data.

Can I see it in action?¶

Head on over to http://frcdb.net !

News¶

• April 1st, 2011: Some actual wiki updates, including API and others.
• March, 2011: The 2.0beta preview is officially running on http://frcdb.net/ with the first working version of the new database!
• July 29th, 2010: The new interface has been officially released!

FAQs¶

What tools/languages were used to make FRC-DB?¶

It is 100% pure Java and HTML (and JavaScript). As for libraries it's built on, we use:

• Tomcat 6 as our app server;
• Apache 2 as our web server (details);
• Apache Tiles, to handle layout and theming;
• HtmlUnit as the base for the crawler;
• Jama to handle matrix math;
• jQuery for JavaScript additions, with plugins:
  • dataTables - for table sorting and filtering;
  • jQuery UI - for theming the tables
• OrientDB as the database;
• NetBeans for development;
• Jackson for JSON exports and parsing;
• Cewolf for graph generation (uses JFreeChart
• textile4j for Wiki syntax (version 1.20, available from seemingly nowhere); and
• JTidy to clean up output and help track down errors;

Current stable version: 2.0beta
Current testing version: 2.0beta-orientdb-svn

Version 2.0 should be finalized in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

...Help?¶

Most support requests should be directed to the IRC channel. Bugs and features requests will be added here as we hear about them. The chatroom is also a perfectly valid place to discuss general (software) development and assorted other FRC and robotics related endeavors!

If you just want to report a bug or file a feature request, click the "New issue" link above and fill out the form. We'll get to it as soon as we can, but it helps if we're notified about it somehow (via IRC, for example).

If needed, you may also contact the developers directly:

• Tim Buckley / timothyb89 - timothyb89@gmail.com

What does FRC-DB's future look like?¶

We're currently working on refining our data and adding support for user-provided content. Currently this includes image uploads and links to YouTube videos, and will soon be expanded to include the addition of detailed team robot information. For other planned changes, see the roadmap. We're also in the process of expanding the database to include data from more years, which has mostly been completed.

Additionally, we're working on an Android app for both viewing and editing the database to make it much more useful during the competition.

How is FRC-DB licensed?¶

It's licensed under the GPLv3. Make sure to direct all licensing-related questions to the IRC channel.

Can I get a copy of the database?¶

Due to the new inclusion of some sensitive information, we're no longer offering copies of our raw database. If you'd still like to run a local copy of the database, you can generate a clean copy of it yourself fairly quickly (generally around 30 minutes to an hour for crawling/parsing).

We also offer data exports in JSON (see the API), and possibly including XML and CSV data in the future. It's also possible to directly import full de-sensitized data dumps which we'll likely post with the release of 2.0.