A new Lucy

[fester]

I had worked a bit on a program before LDON. With augmentations already in the item data format, I didn't believe it was likely they would alter the data structure of the items when LDON released. I was wrong.

The good news is the new data format is very similar to the spell format used for the last few years. It is much easier to parse items with this format. I suspect they moved to this format to ease their troubles with debugging items when making sweeping changes. I doubt they will ever go back to the C structure format again.

[ksmith]

Edit: scrapped the status breakdown.

As I start work on some of the more complex steps, I'll break down the progress even further.

The web and database work will be going along in parallel with the item collector, but since it's mostly trivial, it doesn't get its own progress list.

During each round of testing, I will take feature requests for both the item collector and the website.

As a closing note, this will require at least jre1.4.2.

[domesticbeer]

Have you considered using SOAP and web services to make DB updates??

[ksmith]

Originally posted by domesticbeer
Have you considered using SOAP and web services to make DB updates??

Currently there is nothing I have planned where SOAP would have a significant (if any) advantage over XMLRPC. XMLRPC being the simpler implementation of the two wins.

XMLRPC is sufficient to allow the client to send new items to the database server. If I decide at a later point in time that transitioning to a SOAP implementation would be beneficial, the code is sufficiently modular to allow that.

If you really want/need the item collector to be able to submit items to your guild's database via SOAP and not XMLRPC, PM me and I'll give you an API to write for so you can write the support classes to send the item data via SOAP.

[ksmith]

My item collector is ready for the first round of testing. Send me a PM if you're interested.

http://eqitems.13th-floor.org/

[fester]

I think I am being picky, but could you not use the same colours as lucy? I am not fond of having to select the text to be able to clearly read it. A white background with blue/black text is very easy for the eyes to read. It seems there are a lot of websites with black backgrounds and light (not bold) text which for me is very hard to read. Is it just me?

Also, one the problems with an open client is fraud. I was planning on attacking this problem by requiring the item to be submitted by multiple people from different ISP's (you can use ARIN's database to match the multiple IP blocks an ISP owns to the same ISP.) Say maybe require 5 copies of the item from 5 different ISPs? That should insure it is a real item while only slightly delaying breaking new items.

[uRit1u2CBBA=]

He does say somewhere that new items will be manually inspected before they are added to the search database on the web site.

I have collected a whole bunch of items -- are they automatically sent to you? Do I have to e-mail them to you?

That part was unclear.

Thanks.

[ksmith]

I personally inspect all items submitted. I also have the option of approving all items in the queue from a specific IP address.

Once the collector sees an item it hasn't encountered before, it immediately sends it to the incoming queue on my server. Such are the joys of multi-threaded programs.


EDIT:
I am using exactly the same colors as lucy, in fact, I'm actually using lucy's css file. Expect the colors and/or layout to change when I am done testing and can spend time to work on the aesthetics of the website.

[ksmith]

I am looking for more people to test/use my item collector. Installation instructions are here.