The major challenge of the project was complex but efficient Artificial Intelligence design: the goal was to support hundreds of simultaneously running auctions without any lags and negative performance issues.As the original system design failed to support the huge load the customer expected. The result was that together with Itransition our customer has won the Fantasy Sports Trade Association Award for the Best New Site!

Fantasy Sports Auctioneer (FSA) is a mechanism that offers a convenient and quick way of auctions preparation, league and players management and, of course, exciting process of team creation by means of auctions.

The system is intuitively understandable for even beginner managers. However, FSA suggests low-level integration of its services into its partners’ applications. In addition, FSA has extensive Help and FAQ sections that clarify any possible uncertainties. 

The system features the following functionality:

• User registration and management;
• Auction mechanism;
• Artificial Intelligence;
• Auctions results management and email notification;
• Cheat Sheet tool;
• League management;
• Auction management;
• XML API integration;
• Export/Import auctions data mechanisms;
• Help and FAQ sections.

From the architectural point of view, the application is a middle-size web application, based on the Tomcat application server and MySQL database server. The application is divided into two parts: back-end business logic and front-end presentation mechanisms. Back-end servers have clustering support. On the client side a browser with Java applets support is required. The client side contains the HTML Client that connects to the server’s component though http protocol and auction applet that uses http protocol to exchange data with NIO based auction server. On the server side there is a DB access framework developed, which manages connections pool, optimizes data reading and caches frequently used data. There is also XML API developed to simplify the integration of the application into external applications.

Technologies used:  JDK 1.4, Java Swing API, Java Servlet API, JSP, JavaMail API, JCE, JDBC, Java, JavaScript, HTML, SQL, XML/XSLT, Database Server: MySQL 4.1, Apache Tomcat 4.x Server, SCRUM, MS Project, IBM Clear Case, IBM Rational Clear Quest.

Efforts: 105 man-months