W3C - API or not?

Maybe a little too early but as we are finishing a new setup for the home page, it looks like it will be possible to allow more customization than we planned in the first phases.

It means that we could add a simple API that will allow players to access our database and create some private reporting, using live data from the simcountry database.

It will allow you to create some "scripts", use them to setup widgets of your own on the home page or maybe the country page and share these scripts with others who could use them or update them for their own use.

The scripts are intended to be very simple with no programming skills needed.

This is read-only of course.

Is this interesting for anyone?
We will probably need to setup a small group of testers.

id be interested in testing, assuming "scripting" is indeed simple.

This would mean everyone could access and customize the statistics I and others used to post on the forum. So, *me points around* yes, there are plenty of interested people.

I would like to be test the applications. And I would also like to see Jinson Xu testing them.

Expected time table:

1. An initial installation of the new home page will be before the end of this month.
2. There will be a two weeks period of feedback and probably some bug fixing. also many other small issues waiting to be fixed.
3. another two or three weeks development cycle that will end up with more widgets and more capabilities for personalizing of the home page.
4. We will then publich a small document that will describe the capabilities of the scripting and the way the feature can be used.
5. we will implement the feature.
6. If successful, it will be folowed up by more syntax, access to more tables like corporations, enterprises etc. and eventually, personalized storage of processed data. This might be a longer term objective.

It may require a separate server to allow for processing without influencing the current servers and it depends on participation.

thanks tom!

I will participate Tom.

I support and anticipate this.

Thanks Tom. It sounds like a useful and welcomed change.

Thank you, Tom. I look forward to this and expect it to be useful and enjoyable.

Im interested in this Tom. Well done for a great idea!

I would be interested Tom,
and it really would be a Ease of use Test considering I'm ignorant of most Data spread sheets. But I KNOW I can see patterns or lack there of

Grayson,
I am going to hazard a guess that "simple" means not requiring to much random access memory. So for instance, you might be allowed to add the market price of corn to your country page but you would not be able to program a traveling circus that parades across the bottom of the page. The programming for the market price of corn already exists because it is in the trade section.

The idea is that you add a widget on the home page, later also on the country page.
the widget will be a page with some data, that can be maximized to contain more data which will be a report, containing data from the game.

you will have a command to "read in" a country record from any world and put some of the data items on your report. then get another country data record, and add these values.

so for example, you will be able to create a report, showing all your countries, in all the worlds and their war index, or a whole bunch of different values from all these countries.

the commands should be easy to use like:

get country record KB:4096
reportfield12=war index
get country record LU:3912
reportfield13=war index
show page

In addition also ways to add texts, titles, country names etc.

The report fields will be locations on a pre-painted report.
There will be a list of all the available data fields and their names.

something like this.