JPresentator, 2004, 2005

Goal of the project

JPresentator is the application designed to make the organization of large chess tournaments easier. It is based on the multiyear experience with huge tournaments organization (up to three hundreds players in eight concurrent tournaments).

Why another program?

So far, there is only one officially accepted program for the chess tournament organization in Czech Republic - Swiss.

It works almost nicely for small tournaments (up to twenty participants) with no need to hurry with applications. However, it absolutely fails when it comes to the need of work with multiple tournaments with the same players at the same moment. Every player has to be added several times to several files. It's a pain. If something goes wrong, the players data has to be changed in every tournament file.

The other disadvantage of Swiss is its undocumented proprietary binary file format. The information stored in the file cannot be handled outside of the Swiss any more (e.g. e-mail addresses are unreachable).

Here JPresentator shines. It works with pretty simple text files (csv), supports variable number of concurrent tournaments and is able to export data to Swiss files. Swiss takes over afterwards for the pairing of matches during tournaments.

Features

• Easy to use.
• Allows fast applications handling.
• Handles multiple tournaments with same players concurrently.
• Reads the data from the simple csv file, that might be easily filled for instance from the web form. The csv file can be opened by Open Office.org Calc, MS Excel, or any text editor.
• Can export the data to the Swiss data file.
• Multi-language support. Currently Czech and English version exist.
• Distinguishes (also visually) applications from presence. The player can fill the application on web in advance and after he or she arrives, he/she is marked as present. There is no need to re-fill the application.
• Some vital tournament statistics are calculated: Number of applications for every tournament, number of present players per tournament, number of total present people.
• The application is multiplatform. It runs whereever Java Runtime Environment runs (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, other Unix systems, Windows).
• It is easy to print either the single player's application, or the list of all players.
• JPresentator is used in action with up to three hundreds of applicants.

Requirements

Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or newer. Tested with the Sun Java 5.0 on Linux and Windows.

Download

If you feel you might need JPresentator, feel free to contact the author.