You all must have noticed it has been quiet here for a while. Draghetto has not been able to really work on the project since the beginning of this year and the last 2 months I also was not able to contribute. Besides the fact that we both are too busy with real life we also acknowledged that we no longer enjoy Hattrick itself.

This brings us to the inevitable … we have decided to stop our work for HO2.

However, fortunately this does not mean the end of the project. We have put too much time into the project to simply let it die. Draghetto was able to find a solution.

Maasarbeit, the company that is hosting a dedicated server for the project, has offered to take over the lead in the project. ‘der_steve’ is a new member in the team and an employee of Maasarbeit. In time he will take over the tasks that Draghetto and myself have been doing for the last 2 year.

At least until the end of the year I will keep being a meber on the team to support the new guy with any questions he might have about the project (code or organization). I do not know exactly how long Draghetto will keep being a member, but he will also be available for some time.

Does this mean HO2 will become payware? The answer to that question is still no!

Maasarbeit has plans for some merchandise and maybe a ‘pro’ version (that would require a small fee), but I would like o invite somebody from Maasarbeit to explain more about the plans they hav with the project.

I would also like to add the reply to this message from Maasarbeit that was done in our forum so you can get reassured aswell

I just want to tell you something about Maasarbeit motivation.

He just loves hattrick and the hattrick organizer. And like everyone else he is waiting for HO2 to be finished. As he heard that the core developers want to stop working on it, he decided to search someone who could finish the project, means he employs someone who would work about 30 hours a week on it, at least until the first final version is published.

Since I just decided to cancel my PhD and me and Sven are old friends, I’m the one who will try to do that.

At the moment I’m still employed as a researcher at the university of duesseldorf, but will start to work fulltime on HO2 in november. I hope I will be able to push the development. Thanks to draghetto and nethyperon we have a great code basis, it would be stupid to stop the work on HO2.

We don’t want to, as nethyperon already wrote, make something like payware out of it. It will stay open source and everyone who wants to contribute is welcome. But the project needs someone who tries to manage the work of all these developers and works on the core. And, if nobody is interested in doing something, of course we will have to do it on our own.

Anyway, we have to think about ways to get money sometime. This won’t effect the core or modules that already have been done or are in work - we think about developing some extensions and sell merchandise.

We just want to finish HO2, nothing else. It’s more for fun than a job

Before leaving you i’d like to give you an update to the status of the project that is not far than be stable and ready to be released, the Core functionaliy are almost done, we’re finishing to work with the new stamina training and within weeks we’ll also adapt the rating calculator to the new system (that won’t be in place soon anyway)

At the moment we are more involved into the creation and the improvement of some basic modules that will include be the first and necessary data to handle the team, speaking in terms of HO1 tabs, roster, team analyzer, training, transfer, matches, league

That’s our goal at the moment, once done we’ll release it and we’ll start working on other improvement already planned

That’s it for now

It was a pleasure to get such a great feedback for HO and HO2, it meant a lot for us, and sometimes you were the only reason we kept working on HO2 when no one really helped us, good that the situation is different now
That’s all for now

Recent changes CHPP xml changes have been validated and tested and do NOT require any change to the code. All funtions will continue to work as before.

Nevertheless some prices regarding the arena were changed in Hattrick. A patched version has been released that contains the corrected values for the arena sizer in HO!.

Please replace the ho.jar in your current installation to update. The new jar file can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ho1/

A lot of HO! users are wondering what will happen with the recent CHPP (XML) changes that are being released by HT. I can imagine the doubt, since HO! would not be updated anymore.

The fact is that I am a HO! user myself, so I will make sure that I can keep using it until HO2 is done far enough to use it. At the moment HO2 is not ready for public releasse yet and even if it was, it will still be in early beta stage. So that’s why I will try to update the HO! source so they will continue to work even with the CHPP changes (no functionality will be changed).

Today the first changes wnet online and it seems HO! is not affected by this. The next changes will go live august 6th. I should have time to patch te sources before that (is required).

NetHyperon

In reaction on my last blog several readers have contacted me telling me they want to contribute some of their spare time developing on HO2. This is really great news!

At the moment I am busy getting these new developers on their way and to divide some work amongst them. Hopefully this will get the development for the first public release of HO2 back on track. Our main targets at the moment are the modules that handle match information, the lineup tool and the team analyzer tool. The rest of the functionality that we scoped for the first release is more or less done, except for some bugs that were discovered by our testers.

With these new developers added to the team we are getting a nice group of people for getting thins done. We are lacking expertise on 1 area though …. graphical design. We are trying to get the application look much better and have a more intuitive user interface. For the graphical design we have been given some help from Maasarbeit (the company that hosts are dedicated project server for free), but I feel we need the graphics design to be a tighter part of the development team.

What we need is a graphics wizard that can help us with icon and other graphical elements for the default application team (also in the long run!). In the beginning it might be a bit more work, but later on I don’t think this should be strenuous job. The problem we are having is that we have nobody with some real skills in Photoshop (or Gimp or whatever) to make a consistent look for all the icons and other element.

There is a basic design, but it needs more work to make it look real slick. We do have a set of icons, but since the person that made these seems no longer available we will have a problem getting icons in the same style when we need additional ones. That is why we are really looking for somebody that can help us in the long run, so the style will keep being consistent into the future as well.

Do you feel you are up to the job and you are willing to make this effort for an application that has a 150K+ user base? Contact me (nethyperon) through the HO forum or drop some comment to this post and I will contact you.

Recently HT announced that they will start converting ‘old’ (ASP) CHPP pages to the ‘new’ ASP.NET technology. In this process they will make several changes to the actual XML that will ne outputted. At the moment some CHPP page is announced to be changed which is not used by HO!, so for now it still safe. Other, more vital, pages will however be changed at some point in time. As soon as that happens HO! will be near to it’s end of life. At least the current HO team is not likely to make the required changes in HO!.

So you will be wondering: “How about HO2?”. Well, in contrary to what some of you might think the project is not dead. Unfortunatly, the progress is extremely slow though. The reason for that is very simple; lack of (active!) developers. I (nethyperon) have taken a break, since I was contributing massive amounts of time. It was getting frustrated to be working on it on my own. At the moment there is only 1 other active developer (agusmba) that is doing a great job, but we definitely need more development reesources to get this job done anywhere soon.

The next 2 weeks I’ll be on holiday visiting the ‘Floating Garden of the Atlantic’ (Madeira). I will NOT be thinking of anything related to HO2 or HT .

When I get back I hope to have found new spirit to continue my work on this project.

I know it has been quit again for some time. The reason for this is the fact that I am trying to keep the project going. At the moment most of the developers (including the ‘project lead’ Draghetto) are busy with real life business, which means that progress is slow.

We have determined what functionality will be part of the upcoming beta GA (general availabiliy) release. With the limited resources we have we try to get that in. So your next question will be … when will it be done? As always I can only say … when it’s done. We can’t make any promisses about release dates, simply because we rely on the spare time developers are willing to contribute. I can only say that I am trying to get it done asap.

At the moment I am working on getting the new Maven2 release build completed, so we can make a new build for our test group. When the m2 build is working properly, we will do regular releases for the test group. Hopefully the release will have as little bugs as possible when going public using this approach.

Unfortunately we were not able to get a useful backup of the old forum database, so we did the only option we had and re-created the forum from scratch. The location is still the same, but all users need to register again and for now it’s all empty. I guess that will change soon

We took advantage of the situation and upgraded the forum to the latest version. We also implemented some measurements in our struggle against spambots (no … this is not a challenge!). Hopefully we wil be able to handle the spam problem better this time.

Enjoy the new forum!

As you may have noticed we the main site and the forum have been offline for some time now. We managed to restore the main site yesterday, but the forum is still down at the moment.

Some months ago we had to find a new (temporary) space to place our stuff, since the hosting for hattrickorganizer.de was overdue. Somebody offered us some space that was payed for, but just sat there unused. It seems that space is now closed, so we can’t use it anymore.

The good thing is that in the mean time a company called Maasarbeit offerred us a dedicated server to put our HO2 stuff (like this blog). Yesterday we moved the main site there too, but we are still working on the forum. At the moment we haven’t been able to get a backup of the DB yet, but we will have that soon. We will also upgrade the forum to the latest version.

So hang in there … we hope to get the forum back online as sson as possibe.

Again we got the same requests as were made for the original HO! application.

Will we make HO2 Open Source? To be honest we have not yet decided. The application will stay free, but we still have to decide if we make it Open Source. One thing is clear … the source will not be released before the first release. This is simply due to the reason we mentioned before, which is that we want to keep the actual application a surprise. And for those interested … the formulas will never be released to Open Source (a wasn’t done for HO!).

About the arguments that are raised for making HO2 Open Source: I don’t beleive HO2 will benefit much from it. Users also wanted to have HO! Open Source, so anyone could help debugging etc. The application has been Open Source for many months now and only 5 patches have been submitted. The persons who posted them are known developers with access to the HO2 repository. They would have been able to make the same patches without having the code in Open Source.
This backs up are position that bringing the application into Open Source will not help development.

We’re back again and this time we’ll start to reveal some of the hidden technical design we did for HO2.

HO2 will be Java Web Start and Java 1.6 based, that was the base of our project, this will help us to update releases, and users will not have to worry about java or the release they have, since JWS will take care of it.

To ensure you use JWS to move of its power, the application must be very modular, and we try to achieve that by expanding the API/Plugin system that we think was one of the best HO1 trademarks.

We expanded that concept to a triple layer:

• - HO2 Core library is just what take care of connection to hattrick, workflow and data model, but it has no knowledge of user interface.
• - HO2 Modules are what in HO1 tabs are, in HO2 each tab is now a separate jar, allowing us to update the single part of the application without the burden to download everything. Modules can see an extended version of API that allows changes to HO2 data model
• - HO2 Extensions are plugins, the only difference are that they will see a reduced set of API, they will have a read-only access to the model, and will be deployed into HO2 as a jar in a directory, making this much more easier and straightforward than HO1

Now that we changed the design making update easier, we had to focus on speed in this release, since we were well aware of the issue this was for the first version of the application and we ended with a solution that we felt was really well designed and gave also good performance on the testing field.

The idea behind it is that HO2 is now a multithreaded application, where the Core controls all of them and calls build of interfaces or refresh when is needed.

This can be done for several reason, the application ha just started and each tab has to be create, the user downloaded a new data from HT thus a refresh is needed, or simply user changed some setting in the program that needs a refresh to take place.

All this is handled by a complex system of events that can be data or human triggered, each module or extension, when loaded will just register to the type of events it is interested into, and only those will be passed to it, when the main workflow manager decide it’s time to build or refresh it

Next time we’ll tell something about some improvement to the UI we’re working on, and that will be the last technical post, after that you’ll be up to date and we’ll start notify you of things as soon as they happen

— keep looking »

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