“Shall-We-Play” was the first application we have ever built on Google App Engine. While teaching a course called ‘Developing Web Applications’ in June 2008, the concept of this application was thrown to students as a sample project. Then we developed this application on Google App Engine in the next two days while demonstrating the process of developing a web application and put the app into use by the end of that week. The app has been helping to schedule games since then.
I started playing Volleyball with a group (later christened as ‘Force’) some time in May/June 2008. The group plays twice a week and primarily used email to poll members of the group in order to schedule a game. So, each member could expect at least 8-10 emails for each game and one member that coordinates would count those email responses to decide whether to play a game or not. The group felt comfortable to have at least 7 members to play a game.
So key motivation was to help the group schedule a game with as fewer emails as possible and let the application co-ordinate and decide automatically without any intervention.
The application uses 2 emails, one to request confirmation of each player and another email to convey the decision.
