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Ave¹ Daily Traffic
| Visits | 681 |
| Pages | 2759 |
| AFL Pages | 395 |
| NFL Pages | 133 |
| NRL Pages | 1204 |
| Super14 Pages | 470 |
| WAP Visits | 2 |
| MIDlet Visits | 1 |
¹Ave for the last 14 days.
Geek Speak
This website was originally created as an exercise in self-education in server-side software technologies with a particular focus on the Java programming language. In selecting football predictions as the subject matter, this project has combined two great passions of mine and the result has been me spending an excessive amount of spare time spent in front of a computer. This page is dedicated to outlining the technologies used on this site should any like-minded geeks be interested.
J2EE
This website has been principally constructed using Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technologies such as Java Servlets 2.5, JavaServer Pages 2.1, JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library 1.1.2, JavaBeans, Java Mail API 1.4 and JDBC 3.0.
This website was born as a clumsy Java Applet. It then transitioned through two incarnations as a clumsy two-tier J2EE web application before reaching its current status as a professional-standard three-tier J2EE web application employing a classical Model-View-Controller (MVC) AKA Model 2 architecture.
Tomcat
The Apache Jakarta Tomcat 6 servlet container is used for the execution of this web application.
MySQL
The relational database technology used by this website is MySQL 5.
HTML & CSS
This site also went through a number of clumsy and generally poor HTML & CSS incarnations. Having since become better educated in the field, I am now a strong advocate of following web standards. This site delivers pages that are all valid XHTML1.0 Strict content, with CSS 2.1 used for almost all aspects of presentation. There are still a few tables wrongly used for layout of smaller elements but I'm working on it.
Please visit the HTML Dog website for an introduction to how HTML and CSS should be done.
Images
In keeping with the earlier versions of Footy Forecaster, this website uses precious few images so as to keep pages as lightweight as possible, thereby resulting in faster page loading. The non-transparent images that are contained on this website are of Portable Network Graphics (PNG) type. This is a patent-free, compressed and lossless image format.
J2ME & MIDP
This site incorporates a Mobile Information Device (MIDP) profile application referred to as a MIDlet. MIDlets are designed to run on any device supporting MIDP, such as mobile phones and hand-held computers.
The Footy Forecaster MIDlet has been developed using Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) technology, the Wireless Toolkit and a variety of free phone and hand-held emulators from Nokia, Palm, Sony Ericsson and the like.
WAP
The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) edition of this site delivers Wireless Markup Language (WML) 1.1 content.
Java Advanced Imaging
The Ratings Graphs on this site are dynamically generated using the Java Advanced Imaging API 1.1.3.
Ant
I love Ant. Probably my all-time favourite software development tool.
Web Host
This website is hosted by eApps. I cannot imagine that you can possibly find a better Java website hosting service for USD$20 per month.
Domain Name
Perfectly sane people spend far too much money purchasing a domain name. As far as I can see Dot Dealers are the best value there is. Only catch is that they don't do country specific domains. No matter, footyforecaster.com.au doesn't appeal anyway.
Books
In 2001 I made my first purchase at Amazon: a beginner's Java book that precipitated this entire project. That purchase signalled the commencement of what has proven to be a long and expensive relationship with Amazon.
Of the many books purchased, a handful have proven to be particularly good. These are listed below. Needless to say, this is a fast changing field and books go out of date very quickly. These are no exception.