EVE Technology Lab

If you have no idea what EveKit is, well you've sort of answered my question

The TL;DR is that I'm considering making Vanguard the last release for EveKit. I'm grateful to all the players who gave EveKit a try, but the fact is that it takes time to run and no one is really using the service (more data below). EveKit seemed like a good idea but it never really caught on, time to try something else. Before I pull the plug, though, I'd like to get some feedback on what worked well and where I totally missed the mark. I have some theories, but I'd like to hear from others.

If you've never tried it, EveKit is a site that really only does two things:

1. Provides a service to regularly download and store API data for characters and corporations.
2. Provides various APIs for accessing your data, as well as a few other useful things like APIs for the SDE and some reference data. You can also do a batch download in CSV format of all your data.

The goal was to allow convenient, casual access to your API data, and also provide a way to jump start the development of other third party apps (via EveKit APIs). Over time we've made various improvements. The biggest deal recently was adding support for full history, which lets you view your data as it appeared at a particular point in time.

The service has been running publicly for over a year now. I gave a talk about it at FanFest this year as well (which gave the site a nice bump). As of today, we're downloading data for about 150 character or corporation accounts, but a fair chunk of those accounts now have expired API keys so we're not actually downloading any data in some cases. Also, almost no one actually accesses their data, either through one of the APIs or for batch downloads. So a lot of people kicked the tires, but nothing really stuck.

Why do you think this failed? The target audience is third party devs, are there just not enough of those? Do third party devs actually want something else?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

P.S. Yes I will be releasing most of the source code, whether I pull the plug or not..

I have heard of EveKit, but to be honest, as a third party dev I never understood why I would want to go through EveKit instead of just pulling the data from the EveAPI directly.

Or maybe I am misunderstanding what EveKit does?

I think you got it. The main reason you'd use EveKit is if you didn't want to bother with keeping your own store of downloaded data (assuming you want to maintain history). If you don't care about history, or you're making straightforward calls (e.g. character sheet), then EveKit is overkill. I was assuming that setting up one of the many libraries, then hooking up to a database or other store, was a bother for most people. But if most devs don't care about history or point in time (or they are willing to do it themselves) then this is definitely overkill.

I'm in full salesman mode now, but the other features that I think are nice in EveKit are things like the ability to download all of your data as a csv dump (one sheet per API section). I also exposed an API for the SDE and made an effort to get it out as quickly as possible once Steve posted his dump. The idea was to let devs skip the six week ritual of updating to the latest SDE (i.e. let someone else do it), but maybe it's not that bad. Finally, I made an effort to keep up with all the API changes, as I found many of the other endpoint libraries tended to lag behind.

From your feedback I'd say I misread dev willingness to download the data themselves, or maybe not many care about history so much.

Thanks for commenting.

Well, with all languages in eve 3rd party apps, it's not really possible for a single person to write a library for them all, but, if it's close enough to EVE API, it won't take long to make the library support both.

I think you could have reached out to the library creators and ask them to add support for EveKit.
Unlimited history is an amazing sell point IMHO, It's one of the features CCP won't implement, but, everyone wants...
jEveAssets, could also have benefited greatly from the auto-sync. For Desktop apps, history can easily be incomplete if the user don't update often enough.

I wish I had known about this earlier...

I don't think there are really all that many 3rd party Devs honestly. There are also about 5 different libraries that I know of, so it might just be over-saturation and for my case at least, I don't use libraries and just build my own stuff. It's not all that complicated and easier on flexibility. Maybe website devs use them more. I'm not sure.

Third party risk is a fair point. It seems that we'll tolerate this for some things (like market data, or maybe the SDE), but not so much for account data. Thanks for your comments.