What is API?
Kain Francois.4328:
Cool, a new forum… So… What the heck is API, and how can it improve my GW2 experience!?
Talis.7261:
An API is an Application Programming Interface.
It may not improve your game experience directly, but it will allow developers to build nice and shiney tools for GW2! (Which you might like!)
Hazed.3901:
API = Application Programming Interface. These APIs are used to get information about what’s going on in GW2 so you can soon see apps with such things as current events going on in maps, WvWvW status trackers ect…
TimeBomb.3427:
An Application Program Interface allows an application to interface with another application.
Or, in layman’s terms, it lets one application use some of another application’s features.
Kain Francois.4328:
In other words, ANET is releasing a toolkit which lets people make mods? And this is safe?
rhoot.5927:
Not mods, just request information about the game’s state.
Geotherma.2395:
You can think of it like a living wiki, if it is happening in game the API or program that uses the API can view that. I think it would be a little like GW2spidy, but for things like events and wvw. But I am far from an expert on API ^^;
Varonth.5830:
In other words, ANET is releasing a toolkit which lets people make mods? And this is safe?
While this would also be called API it is not that kind of API.
The API we currently get let’s us request certain gamestates:
- WvW informations
- Event informations
- Item informations
- Recipe informations
Let’s say you want to implement a website which will collect WvW data and present you nice graphs about the last matches etc.
Without an API users or the site admin/site moderator has to input all the numbers by hand. If there is a website which already displays the data, then they can instead write small scripts which will automate this, by basically requesting said website, and then parse the informations on this site.
These are called Webcrawlers. They act kinda like a browser, just that instead of showing you a website, they will gather the data on this website and use the informations gathered. This comes with alot of bonus traffic for both sides (the website and the one requesting the information), as you will also get alot of unwanted informations which the webcrawler will just skip.
Also such a webcrawler requires a bit of work to implement, and perhaps adjust when the layout of the website changes.
And now we have this API.
It allows a developer to request data in an easy to parse (aswell as kinda easy to read for humans) format. This format is called JSON .
Kain Francois.4328:
In other words, it would be like an ingame dragon timer?
rhoot.5927:
In other words, it would be like an ingame dragon timer?
Nope, nothing in-game. The API is external.
Duskmelt.9834:
Well, today I learned something new. This is pretty awesome! I’m looking forward to see what our community will come up with this.
Kain Francois.4328:
Ok, so all these are browser things like Dragon Timer?
The Talcmaster.7391:
Not really, sites like Dragon Timer use the API but it is not actually the API itself. APIs are just little endpoints and whatnot that lets people connect their own apps to and use the data or functionality that it provides.
rodadams.5963:
Think of it as a something for a Dragon Timer site to talk to.
Instead of having lots of people poking the site to say when certain events start or stop, the Timer can instead just go ask the API periodically what the state of those events are at this time.
Expect the Timer sites to get a lot more accurate, and much more Troll resistant.