EVE Technology Lab

I know CREST is still undergoing development but I wanted to put my two cents in here. For what it's worth, I'm writing a little thingy for my own personal use and found that the market/groups endpoint is just... OMG to work with.

So here's my reasoning, followed by my current json format after I pass the endpoint through my script:

• Drop href for each item, and key each group by its actual key ( a number )
• Drop types, if you key by the actual group #, you leave it up to the developer
• Nest the groups appropriately ( like I have in my example ), or add a parent key with it's associated ID instead of using parentGroup.href

Side note: in my example, I have the 'children' key for my purpose only, that could just be dropped in favor of a regular object notation.

If anyone would like to walk through my code and see how I'm re-formatting the data, you can do that by checking the GitHub repo for my current project: https://github.com/JayWood/eve-market-importer

So, here's the format I propose for the endpoint, would really appreciate some feedback form CCP, or even an explanation of the reason keys currently exist: https://gist.github.com/JayWood/7f6025d4feea193ae3f3

CREST seems to try to follow HATEOAS (or at least I got that impression), but fails at certain points. But I think (hope) things will get ironed out with time and everybody will be happy.

The point is - if you don't know the resources and/or actions, HATEOAS is a good thing. But if you do, and in EVE we do given the SDE and XML API, using hrefs just makes things unnecessary complex. IMHO, current CREST implementation is a textbook example of overengineering, where the 80/20 principle applies - 20% use cases make 80% other use cases a pain. I would really love a versioned WADL API.