Announcing stats.footballpredictions.net
A long time ago I wrote a brief round-up of the options for generating HTML output from Haskell. The reason I was looking into this at that time was because, as an exercise to learn more about programming in Haskell, I was attempting to replicate the functionality of my Football Statistics Applet (FSA) but with pure HTML output rather than a heavyweight interactive Java applet.
The result of this effort was a Haskell program I call Anorak, the vast majority of which I wrote quite a while ago (it’s not going to win any prizes for beautiful Haskell code). It processes FSA data files and, using HStringTemplate, generates static HTML pages containing league tables, form tables, sequences and more.
Having left Anorak dormant for months, yesterday I tidied up a few rough edges and created stats.footballpredictions.net. This online resource provides current and archive statistics for the main football leagues in England, including an all-time Premier League table that incorporates the result of every match played since 1992. I also intend to include all of the main Scottish divisions soon but the Scottish Premier League has a bizarre split structure that, though supported by FSA, is not yet supported by Anorak. Other European leagues (Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga) will follow some time in the future.
Update: Anorak has been updated to deal with the SPL-style split format and the site has now been expanded to include the SPL and all divisions of the Scottish Football League.
on June 7th, 2010 at 10:31 am
Hi there,I like your site and it looks very interesting and easy to read,really!. I am from Denmark. I love the Soccer and cannot wait till 11th June, can you?.But there is a problem camming from FIFA. It is that doesn´t choose the best teams in this planet for the World Cup which it should otherwise don´t call the World Cup a final, if you want to play football for the soul of competition then go to the olympics games. this is exactly what the World Cup is turning to, and it su…, ire needed to beat portugal to be in and is not, jap beat lowly teams as bahrain, qatar, kuwait, to be in, is this justice I dont think so, just because you are in the World Cup it doesn´t mean that you have the quality to be in like jap can attes. Any way, I expect to watch a great final on 11th July and my favorite winner team is Denmark,and my favorite player is Ricardo Kaka.Good blog and keep going.Cu!
on June 7th, 2010 at 11:44 pm
Hi Dan.
Will the code for this be available for use by others one day?
I take it that the existing data from the java app can be ported across to this version.
Phil…
on June 9th, 2010 at 1:52 am
@Phil: I haven’t decided exactly what I intend to do with the code yet, so I’m not actively encouraging other people to use it at the moment. But yes, it does use the same data files as FSA (with some minor enhancements). It has customisable templates so you can make the HTML look however you want.
The code is available on GitHub. If you *really* want to use it now, you could try installing GHC and Cabal and building it from source, but that’s only for the adventurous. Also, there is no documentation at all so, even if you were able to build it, it won’t be clear how to actually use it. This is deliberate on my part. I am making regular changes to the software and don’t want to support it in its present form. I may distribute it properly in future but not soon.
Which version of FSA are you using? I never actually got round to packaging up version 3 (as seen here: http://www.footballpredictions.net/fsa.html) as an official release. If you want to upgrade to that in the meantime, I can do a proper release.
on June 10th, 2010 at 7:39 am
I’m on version 2.0.3 Dan.
I’m happy with that and I’m not very clever
so trying to build something from source isn’t something that I would be capable of.
Phil…