football manager facebook application

Question

hey guys i'm about to begin a football manager inspired facebook application in php/mysql and had a couple of questions:

1) where would be the best place to host the database? any services offered within great britain would be excellent!

2) does anyone have any ideas on how i could use player statistics as part of the in-game match engine? how would php accomodate this? i would like to make the matches as realistic as possible?

3) lastly i wanted to know whether php/mysql would be the best language to code this game in. i am quite confident within this language and can pick up new skills relatively quickly. but i am worried once again (in reference to number 2) about how i would simulate matches using the data from php. i'd appreciate any pointers.

thanks for the help guys!

Answer 1

2) You'd need to find an API that offers player statistics in some way, but if you're thinking along the lines of physical traits rated on a scale from 1 to 10 I fear you're out of luck. You could look into exporting player statistics from the original Football Manager game or somethijng along those lines, but I doubt it's available.

3) PHP will do fine.

Good luck!

Answer 2

1. For database hosting, the DB provided with your web host is usually suitable. For read-only applications or applications that very rarely update or delete information, the other option would be to use Amazon SimpleDB. It's very fast for fetching simple data (almost like NoSQL) and is free until you hit a certain pricing tier.
2. This is something you'll have to work out on your own; I'm no football expert and would have a difficult time trying to give you much advice. Maybe if you could explain your situation a little more, I could give you a stronger response.
3. Use the language that you're most comforable with. If that's PHP, then go with PHP. If you write your code best in another language, then use another language. Facebook has a particularly well written PHP library, so I certainly encourage you to take advantage of it if PHP is your strong suit, but there are plenty of other languages with very strong FB libraries available. As for MySQL, the DB doesn't really matter very much. I've used MySQL, SQLite, and SimpleDB for Facebook apps. All three have their strong points and their weaknesses. Choose a database engine that suits your needs: MySQL is very strong in overall performance. SimpleDB is great for reliability and simplicity, but bad for update or deletion-intensive applications. SQLite is great if you're looking for an extremely portable DB that is infrequently accessed for only simple I/O (i.e.: storing user session tokens). Make sure you plan to scale: don't build an app on SQLite if you intend to have a million users someday, and don't build on SimpleDB if you intend to be updating information in realtime.

Anyhow, good luck in your application! Hope this helps!

Answer 3

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