[Wowr-discuss] Hello world

[renchap]

Peter Wood a écrit :
> Hey Renaud,
Hey,
> 
>> Seems it is the mailing list about wowr development, i hope we will
>> improve wowr together. This project is very useful for me as i am
>> developing a wow related website based on armory data.
> 
> Just to let you know I'm still trying to drag others onto the mailing
> list, for now it's just you and I.

Ok. I hope more people will come to help us :)

>> First, the get_character call use 3 (2 with paul's github version)
>> queries. I am storing character data in a db, and only update it when
>> it changes. If characted has not changed (based on armory last update
>> data), i dont need to fetch reputations, which uses one less request.
>> I plan to split get_character into 2 methods (get_character_sheet and
>> get_character_reputations), which will be called by get_character, but
>> also allows you to fetch them alone. Are you ok with this ?
> 
> I think you mean me, Peter, not Paul... although according to my parents
> I was almost a Paul. 

Sorry, i know a Paul Wood ;)

Yes this is one aspect of Wowr I would like to see
> changed, the problem is you can't break the API for backwards
> compatability.

I plan to maintain backward compatibility, but i will add some
methods/classes to handle this.

> get_character will have to stay the same as it is now, and either by
> introducing two seperate stand alone functions or by flags being passed
> to get_character. Without looking at the source, I believe what you want
> should be relativly easy within the scope of the objects.

I started to work on this :
http://github.com/renchap/wowr/commit/11e999930ebf4561772858000cd1edc0a1cf3673

I am now working on a InfosCharacter.to_fullCharacter method which will
allow you to convert an InfosCharacter to a FullCharacter by copying
attributes and fetching reputations.xml.
I will also add an API method to get an InfosCharacter. Maybe i can add
an optional method to get_character to select which informations you
want. What do you prefer ?

>> I also plan to add an optional rate limiter on http queries (to avoid
>> bans from armory if too many requests), i will try this later.
> 
> Yes, most of us who have done any form of Armory pulling have been
> banned with 500 before now. I'm not strictly sure that this is an aspect
> for Wowr to solve however.

Wowr should at least give information about how many HTTP requests have
been done so far, with a way to reset this counter. This counter should
also be armory specific (i think wowarmory.com and eu.wowarmory.com dont
share the same limit counter).

> In my own project, Syndicate, which is how I got onto using Wowr in the
> first place, we now have a background daemon that runs, analyses how
> much work it has to do in a block of time, and then calculates how long
> it needs to wait inbetween each poll. With a minimum wait period in
> between.
> 
> In my experience you are okey to pull say 3-4 XML files simulataniously,
> providing you then wait a period of time afterwards. We are currently
> using a minimum wait time of 10 seconds, and on average with our work
> load it's waiting about 180 seconds between each character pull.
> 
> I've spoken to the guy who runs be.imba.hu, and his back ends wait 2
> seconds and get away with it. Although he indicated he had different
> gatherers about the internet to distribute the load.
> 
> It may be that you want to write a small queuing library that uses Wowr
> as a seperate gem

Maybe we can use a plugins system for HTTP queries, and provide an
example plugin which implement a simple rate limiter ? I dont see how a
separate gem can provide this kind of functionnality. If you have more
informations, I am interested :)
Or we can just leave this to the developer which uses Wowr by providing
counters, as said above.

> 
>> I also need talents infos, and achievements/stats. If nobody adds it,
>> i think i will try to do so.
> 
> Achievements is my next priority to develope into Wowr, these and
> statistics go hand in hand and need to be developed in a none static
> manner. For example, we can't have statistics objects with hundreds of
> predefined variables. If we do that we will be playing catch up with
> Blizzard forever.

I think we will need some kind of database (plain yaml files should be
ok) to store all achievements locally, with a built-in rake task to
create this database from armory and update it.
I need achievements to store any changes in a database. In the
achievements main xml, you get how many achievements points in each
categories. I personnaly need to be able to request categories details
if the category total have changed.

> I'm excited to see a different view of Wowr then my own. I'd like the
> option for data to be able to be pulled in a more selective manner.
> 
> My personal long term goal for Wow is that the objects that are returned
> can be used to requery via functions, rather then having to recostruct
> the call.
> 
> For example, in your case, you do a get_character_sheet and you get
> their basic information, but they you can call character.get_factions.
> Not final API wording, but I hope you understand what I suggest.

I agree on this.
On an ideal world, i think all request should only be made on-demand.

Like (pseudo-code) :
char = Char.new(:name => 'Mychar')
# (no requests made)
char.level
 => 80
# a request have been done to fetch level, and others informations
provided by the needed xml
char.reputations
 => Hash...
# Another request for reputations

We can also provide a manual way to speficy which informations should be
loaded, like giving an array to constructor, or methods to load these
informations (and use an algorythm to minimize number of requests needed
for a specific st or informations)

> 
> Peter.