Yes, what have I been doing all this time? For anyone who does not know yet: I am a big fan of VfR Wormatia 08 Worms e.V, and together with a few friends I build and maintain the football club's website.
For the new football season, the club wants to play in the new Regionalliga. So we said to ourselves, "New league = new homepage."
But the new homepage should not be just any homepage. Since we are fortunate enough to have several programmers at the club, the solution naturally has to be a little better. The goal was to find a scalable solution that would let us distribute existing information to different applications (websites, mobile phones, browser toolbars). We decided to try a service-oriented approach. This meant creating service interfaces. Since REST is really popular at the moment, we chose this "format."
The graphic shows the system's basic concept.
Until now, the site had run quite well in a TYPO3 system. We definitely wanted to keep it that way. So we had to extend TYPO3 to communicate with the web services. Said and done: we created a TYPO3 extension tailored specifically to our web service. The extension communicates with the web service, retrieves data in XML format and transforms it using XSLT. Special handling for forwarding GET and POST parameters still had to be added. Everything can be configured very well from TYPO3.
As attentive readers have probably already noticed, I am writing this in the past tense because the sites have essentially already been implemented. The actual website is currently getting its finishing touches. Overall, though, everything already feels quite good, and the fans can look forward to a beautiful new website. The new site is expected to go live on June 14, 2008.
So far, the entire system consists of three websites:
- Administration site (for managing matches, leagues, players, etc.)
- API service interface
- www.wormatia.de — the actual website
When I get a chance, I will describe the individual sites in more detail. Until then, you will have to be patient.