EVE Technology Lab

TL;DR Versioned XML API data is coming to the EveKit beta site on July 5th, and then to the main site on July 12th if all goes well.

Thought it was worth busting out of the usual update thread for a new feature I'm pretty excited about.

At the end of my FanFest talk I mentioned new work called the EveKit Wayback Machine. This feature is now nearly complete, to the point where I expect I'll be able to release it to the beta site the weekend of July 5th, and then out on the main site (if all goes well) on July 12th.

The idea is the same as the Internet Wayback Machine, where in this case I'm saving all XML API data over time. The main features and changes are:

• All XML API data (a.k.a. synced data) that can be accessed by an API key will be versioned each time it changes.
• All EveKit APIs for accessing synced data will now include an optional "at" parameter. Omitting this parameter will return the latest live version of the requested synced data. Setting this parameter to a time value (milliseconds UTC since the epoch) will return the version of the requested synced data as it appeared at the given time.
• Weekly downloadable snapshots only represent the latest version of synced data. I'm working on a service to request a snapshot of your data at a given time, but it won't be complete for the initial roll-out.
• When the site upgrade occurs, all current data will become the initial live version of the data, and will start versioning at the next XML API sync.

There are numerous technical details which I'll post to the blog soon.

I'm planning to use the new features to better track assets in my tiny corporation over time. I'm sure some of you more creative types will come up with more interesting uses.