New Lottery 'Euro-Millions' and TCO problems...

12:41.37 - Friday 13th February 2004   (Link to This Entry)

I find myself in the uneviable position of having to rewrite my Lottery Results Website because it was never designed to handle multiply 'bonus ball' numbers - which the new Euro-Millions game introduces for the first time. This is an oversight on my part, granted, and not easily fixable, mainly because the number for bonus balls is hardcoded as '1' into the site at numerous points.

So I'm looking at rewriting the site again, but this time I want to do it in PHP to get around another problem I'm having with ASP fallingover when there's too much going on. The added speed that PHP (and MySQL) brings would improve the site no end and I could created the databases to be fully scaleable, so that even if Camelot et al released a 'match 12 from 26 and 5 bonuses from 9' game, it would still work.

The main obstacle I have is the sheer size of the website. The-Lottery.info has grown from a place showing the latest numbers into a huge lumber behemoth of slightly-dodgy ASP code. Granted, as long as I got basic functionality sorted first I could add to it later, but it's still a huge job.

Then there's moving the data - I've somehow got to replace all of my Dbase files with MySQL and port over thousands of records: draw results; account details; game definitions; user lines and more. None of the problems are insurmountable by themselves, but together they give one pause.

And of course, a rewrite will (probably) mean a new site design as well.