ShrimpWorks

After almost exactly two years since the last release of Out of Eve, here is version 3.0.

As may be noted from the release note, the main goal of this release is to catch everything up with the current state of EVE, it’s API, and the static data dump.

Along the way some new stuff was also added an improved, like the new menu system which allows access to all your characters, so there’s no need to switch between them and then view detail pages, and the introduction of memcached caching, which stores and retrieves entities loaded from the static database dump, reducing page load times and database accesses (a single page load may result in hundreds of individual MySQL queries).

I’m rather pleased with this release, and it seems a lot more solid than most before.

I’ve also got the public Out of Eve website back up, now featuring HTTPS courtesy of Letsencrypt, at last.

Things have been very quiet on the code front lately, with bursts of activity here and there.

Primarily, I’ve been hacking on Out of Eve. The structure API classes and implementation of the API requests has been bugging me, especially when I’ve had to add a lot of stuff in recent versions, it just grows and grows and becomes unmanageable. Unfortunately fixing it has obviously resulted in breaking every single piece of the application, which I’ve been slowly refactoring and putting back together slightly more sensibly.

On the other hand it’s also a good opportunity to make allowance for the new customisable API key features CCP are implementing.

Besides that, my totally rad completely unique super secret Java-powered website project is stalled. Java’s turned out to be a bit of a pain in the backside. Sure all the background code is nice and stuff, but actually making the website portion of stuff quite sucks. I suspect this project will also need a near complete refactor at some point… Sigh. Coming soon in 2019!

Happy days. Now fully “Incursion” compatible.

Coming soon is updated API support (mail, taxes), and hopefully some more handy plugins :).

This is just a small update on the status of OOE. As the SVN server previously hosting the OOE source died, and many people have been looking for the source, a Google Code project has been started to facilitate future development.

The source is available as both a regular download and via Subversion.

It’s unlikely I will be doing any development on the project myself, however contributors are welcome.

Hah. Only 3 months late.

Out of Eve has been fully updated to Quantum Rise spec, the promised journal feeds, API key security, and a number of other tweaks. OutofEve.com has been updated to the latest available version, and the source is available for download.

Please leave any feedback in the comments of this post. I’ll set up a proper OOE page on this site at some point, with download links and more detailed information.

As mentioned previously, I just wanted to outline a few plans for a new Out Of Eve version, mostly for my own reference, as I’m finding it much easier to work toward goals which are actually written down/typed up (lol?).

Obviously first order of business is Empyrean Age compatibility. A number of table and field names have changed and require some code updates. Lots of icons have been added and updated, so I would also like to make use of those. Unfortunately a number of images are actually missing in the EA icon dump (drones, rookie ships), so a simple drop-in replacement doesn’t works so well.

Another essential requirement, which should probably have been included in the original release, is encrypted API keys. My plan is to simply encrypt and decrypt these with a simple key file stored elsewhere in the filesystem - away from the usual configuration file, database and published www documents, so if any of that is compromised, without the key file, the API keys are useless to anyone snooping them. This also requires a method to automatically update existing unencrypted API keys.

Another handy feature would be the introduction of Atom feeds for market and journal transactions. My initial idea was an entry for each new transaction, however anyone doing a lot of trading would find their feed reader overloaded quite quickly. The obviously better solution is to just generate entries with all transactions since the last feed poll (taking into account API caching delays as well). I know I’d find this one particularly useful.

Actually that’s all :-). If all goes well, it should be releasable by the end of the weekend.