SportPage is distributed as a Java Servlet Web-Applications Archive (sportpage.war); in most modern servlet containers, this file should be placed in your webapps directory and your servlet container restarted.
To upgrade an existing system, the war file can be queried to extract specific components, so you can extract just the WEB-INF/lib to update only the SportPage java libraries.
SportPage also depends on several foreign Java libraries. To protect against version conflicts, the specific version of the binary Java jar files are included in the sportwire/Foreign package; sources for all of these jar files are freely available on the net or from the Sportwire authors. For a full list of jar files not included in the distribution, see the README file in the SportPage package.
Almost anything is SportPage can be manipulated through the WEB-INF/sportpage.conf configuration file. Throughout this user guide you will be referred to this file to make local changes, and because the developers spend so much time with this config file, the comments in that file should be taken as the closest thing you are likely to get for an authoritative reference.
The configuration file is based on the Apache Commons ExtendedProperties specification; it is not a standard Java property file but is more similar to an Apache configuration file. Critical differences include
Non-string items are validated by the loader and rejected if the formats do not conform to the Java specifications. These include dates, integers, and floating point numbers
Lists composed of strings separated by commas are represented in the SportWire applications as String[] (string arrays) and not strings; if you take the toString() method of a list variable, you will get only the first element of the list.
the special token include indicates a secondary configuration files to be included at this point. The filename may be absolute or relative to the current directory.