You all love the Springboks right? Those men in green who do South Africa proud? Well I guess the Kiwis or Aussies or Pommies or…err wait ok dont like the Springboks that much. But I love em and the other night I started thinking about writing an app that will allow me to select a Springbok squad (or two or three) from the Super 14 teams that are currently playing. So what I did is I honestly collected some player and squad information and put it into a database, and the way I did this was to use HtmlAgility to screen scrape player information from www.sarugby.net, and I did it quite easily and successfully got some information and managed to store it. You can see on this page, albeit it might be a bit slow in coming through, that you can search for rugby players here and once you have found a rugby player you can also get the rest of his team mates in his squad. Scary what you can do with a good HTML parser. I then took the information and created a few objects with properties and methods, and then I stored the information. Note that my intention is not to make money! I just liked the code that went into it. And the data that I stored I made available through an incomplete interface here. You can click on the squads to the right, which displays the players for that squad and if you click on a player you see their information displayed. My next idea was to assign each player to one or more positions and then in the left hand pane create icons that represent rugby jerseys, and then make the players you select “addable” to the left until you reach the maximum number of players allowed.

I enjoyed doing it anyway, and I’m trying to do small projects at night to keep me motivated.