I have recently come to a conclusion that a project I've built, can't show its potential or even see a light of the day properly if it keeps being used by one-man band such as me. So I'd like to make an inquiry which would hopefully result in a clear answer to what steps I should take regarding the project.
I have already written to site owners about this, but I feel like I missed the target audience, so hopefully this way I get things straight and obtain the feedback I actually needed. I owe a thank you to the admin, however, for taking the time to actually read the whole message (which might not be an easy task )
The project
The project I've built is a kind of a configurable web automation engine with a user interface, where the user interface allows one to create so called configurations. The configuration essentially consists of "actions", with the ability to wait for certain conditions before or after each action is executed. The currently supported actions should be enough to scrape data from any kind of web site.
Currently supported actions are, simply put:
- navigation to a URL;
- arbitrary script execution;
- selected web page element click;
- conditional action, i.e. if a certain condition is met, execute this action, else, execute that action;
- enumeration action, i.e. find all elements which meet certain criteria and then perform further actions with each of them.
The automation engine is usually plugged into another project which uses the output from it and performs analysis, i.e. the automation engine uses configurations which tell the engine how to collect odds from various sportbooks, and then the project which the engine is plugged into performs the analysis of collected odds and finds arbs, values bets or w/e, or just stores the collected data for data warehousing needs, or.... you get the idea.
Here is an example of how the interface to view the configuration actions look like at the moment (follow the link so we don't overstretch this post, it's already stretched enough as it is): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QeF3A3 ... -BTOO/view
The image doesn't show it, but each action depicted above has it's own interface (depending on the action type) which allows one to edit the action, set pre-execute or post-execute wait condition, and all things relevant to that action.
Bear with me, as the UI is currently localised to my language. But I've made sure it's easy to localise to any language required (for those of you who are tech savvy, i18n standard is used on the front-end application).
This image represents, what once was, a valid and tested configuration to obtain odds for certain markets for all the available football games from bet365. They have changed some of their layout in the meanwhile, which is understandable since this configuration has last been updated more than 5 months ago.
The idea
The idea is to create a service which would allow users to create their own automation configurations. Users would then be able to create and download a portable executable file based on the configuration they created. Such generated executable file would be able to execute their created automation configuration from their computers, or from whichever machine they find fitting for it.
That executable file would then be able to provide an endpoint which users could use to read the data produced by the automation, or write the data to some configured output, such as a file, or both. Obviously, this service would target people who know how web pages work, because in order to create a configuration, one would either have to know about web page layout and elements, or pay someone else to create a configuration for them.
The service could also have a function to host some of the user-created configurations as well, execute them and provide an endpoint for the requesting user to be able to read the data.
This community has given me knowledge about the vast world of smart betting, so I'd like to give something back. Therefore I'm thinking, after the project is ready, to offer it, as I have imagined it, to arbusers community members for free.
But it's not quite there, just yet. First I need to see whether people actually need this in the form I described above. So be free to comment with your ideas or suggestions. After I gather the feedback, hopefully positive, I will take time and shape the service to the form that we agreed here in this thread. That might also take some time as I'm a one-man band, but I'd try to wrap things up as soon as possible, after all, in smart betting, I'm not sure time is our ally.
And thanks for reading.