Need some advice on how I should build the application that I want.

So I run a Smash Bro tournament in my town and we get about 50 people. We use Challonge to keep track of our brackets and such. The way that it works is that you play on your Wii U setup, you go up to me and tell me your score and I update the Challonge website on my computer, updating the bracket.My friend wants to create a "app" (as he says) where I have a central hub (so my computer) with all the matches from Challonge, and I can send a specific match to an individual Wii U setup (say, each Wii U setup has an iPad next to it) and the iPad will display the match, and after people are done competing, they can update the iPad with their match results, which in turn updates the Challonge website.This is all possible, Challonge has an API that I can use. So the question is now, how should I go about building this app.I went ahead and tackled it and created a express server that uses socket.io with the Challonge API. However (although a solution and it is working), it is very complicated when it comes to setting up/the requirements needed. (If you want you can check the github thing here...http://ift.tt/2qWWtsi)The express server needs to have internet or some sort of connection so it can send a match thru socket io to the individual Wii U setup. So if you don't have internet in the venue you literally can't use it.The iPads need to go to the localhost on a web browser and connect to whichever computer is running the server (so a 192.168. url) and well, I feel like this could be better.I was thinking of maybe using react native or something to make it a mobile app, but then that just raises more questions.Are there any other solutions that I could perhaps use ? The express server is a decent solution but I feel as though there might be a better way to solve this problem. What if I want to make this app easy to use for other people ? (Which I kinda want to do). I have to explain to them all the specific requirements that they need ? Any direction would be appreciated, thanks .

Submitted July 01, 2017 at 08:30PM by HappyZombies