Introduction

This is a project undertaken with a team of 6, with me attempting the role of lead programmer. The idea is to create a front-end and a back-end that can support an online interactive application. The functionality of the application is to create tournaments between users for various purposes, whether to compete at a friendly 8 people pool tournament or a big football tournament between 32 or more teams.

Technologies: Java, SpringBoot, JQuery-Mobile, Javascript, HTML, CSS.

Front-End

At the beginning of the project, the minimum viable product (MVP) was identified so as to try and stick to a strict plan, develop something that works and if time permitted, add extra functionality. The MVP plan was to have the most common tournament structure added which is knockouts tree with users that can easily create tournaments and add rules such as max game points. Also have a very user friendly interface with users able to simply join tournaments with invitations or codes.

• There were many plans and ideas in the team at the start of the development, therefore we started templating some of the ideas and testing user interfaces in an attempt to find the most user friendly and aesthetically pleasing layout. Such an early stage plan is shown in Figure 1.

  

• The application has a very simple use case diagram Figure 2 that shows how simple and effective we planned the application to be. Just as explained above we aimed for simplicity and ease of use.

  

• Technical: As mentioned in the introduction for the front-end development, HTML, CSS and Javascript was used with the JQuery-Mobile library. The specific library is a single page application format that provides good widgets and structures that allow for development of a website in an application style capable of running smoothly in a mobile phone. Code for the front end is located in the Git repository (button next to the Introduction title) and inside the src/main/resources folder.

Back-End

• The backend was developed in Java, using Spring Framework. A REST API was created for the application to interact with the server and store important information online. The underlying database used was H2, an integrated database, for testing purposes and fast development but was planned to be replaced with MySQL later. 
• The API supported user registration and login, users creating and generating a randomized Tournament with all the participants. Editing details of individual games and automatically advancing the winning team to the next round. Deleting tournaments. Changing Profile nicknames and viewing a number of statistics such as number of tournaments won, number of tournaments participated and more. There was planned functionality for allowing creation of tournaments for teams instead of individuals and also support for people editing their profiles, adding profile pictures and more. In addition, different tournament types would be later implemented and supported, such as leagues.