EVE Information Portal

Our EVE 3rd party development community is simply awe inspiring and now that I've gotten that out of my system, I recommend all 3rd party developers go here and read this dev blog about some changes we're making to the EVE 3rd Party Toolkit.

/me cries quietly about more conversion work

Yay! Time to learn something new. (that's actually a positive yay, rather than a sarcastic one)



Now to wait for the update so I can download it.

Can you elaborate on the decision to change to YAML? My understanding of the format (having used it before) is that it's appropriate when the information needs to be both human- and machine-readable. Configuration files are an obvious candidate. Static data, on the other hand, seems more appropriately stored in a database or at least a table format (like CSV). YAML is a lot of key/value pairs and arrays. Why was it chosen to represent tabular data?

sixth, I guess as module names change and more are added then changes to the toolkit are needed too. Hmm evolution.

Samples for those too lazy to open it up:





I hope they find more value in later YAMLs. These could have been done just as well with CSV files.

I truly don't understand why anyone would use this Yam-something over XML but that is not my decision to make.

Where I really see a problem is here:

There are at least two totally different uses cases for the static data:

a) Something like a stand alone application for processing manually some data.

b) A web app processing Millions of datasets and calculation on the fly.

For a) it does not really matter if there are csv oder xml or yam-something files.

But b) needs a database.

And for all the effort you are doing here there is no way to provide sql files anymore?

YAML is a superset of JSON. That said, I don't think either are appropriate. They can handle tabular data, but that's like saying you can send someone a picture as a Word document filled with comma-separated color values. Yes, the information is there, but it's in the wrong format.

(As far as I know,) EVE static data is tabular, not flexible key/value data like YAML is meant to represent. XML is sort of in between the two.

Honestly, I'm more concerned that CCP is choosing to use YAML internally than that they're forcing us to use it. I guess I shouldn't jump to conclusions before CCP can comment on it, though.

Item ID please stop using names.

Because relational databases which have decades of research, optimalizations, and development behind them are too mainstream. Let's throw XML at the problem.

Also, we want to make life easy for application programmers, so for the forseeable future we will make you pull half of the data from a DB, and half of it from XML. You know, just to expand your horizons.

As some have correctly noted, the reason for the split format delivery is due to an internal process change in how we manage static data, both during authoring and at run-time. This is a gradual migration effort that will see more and more portions of the static data dump delivered as YAML files. There is currently no date for when we will stop delivering the database dump, rather it will occur when there is no data left in it.

We will be delivering up to date samples of the YAML files and data base dumps ahead of each major release (assuming the data has changed) to give 3rd party developers a chance to update their tools.

These will be posted on the EVE Toolkit page.