Fantasy Draft Tool

Question

I'm attempting to mitigate some of the fantasy football draft issues I've had the last few years by creating my own drafting tool. The major requirement, similar to the major draft tools out there (ESPN, Yahoo, CBS Sports, NFL, etc) is to allow people to log in and participate in the draft. I'd like for the draft to be started by an Admin, and be running regardless of if anyone else logs in or logs out, it just needs to run; draft status, draft clock, next team to choose.

I'm familiar with PHP and MySQL however, I'm not thinking this will be enough as I can't maintain the state of the draft using PHP...at least I don't think so to handle this. What would be the recommended avenues to pursue to handle the above requirement?

Answer 1

I just started writing one for kicks a few days ago using PHP, MySQL, and Ajax Push Engine (APE).

APE's site is down right now, but check it out when it's up: http://www.ape-project.org/

Answer 2

I would suggest an outside process to run the draft itself. It would place the necessary data in the DB and PHP can be used to act on this data.

The major challenge would be the coordination between that outside process and PHP.

The outside process could be something like a perl script, which could be kicked off with a cron job.

Answer 3

You can have realtime interaction without ajax by using websocket, i wrote a realtime app just like gchat with it, it's pretty realiable apart from flash requeriments.