DOTLAN EveMaps

Well you likely noticed that there was no bigger update in the last time on DOTLAN EveMaps (apart from the tracking feature in September). The truth is: yes, there’s not a lot of new stuff I can do right now with the lack of new (public) APIs to process and analyze data. So I took the time to do something useful and painful (from workload perspective).

I wanna give you some insight what’s going on the background:

Complete rewrite of the codebase

• Replace the huge amount of scripts and mod_rewrite rules with a MVC-like framework for page generation.
• Major code cleanup and rewriting of old classes (which are smelling like 2003)

Rewrite of the background Daemons (once again)

• To make background jobs ready for the future I rewrote my PHP daemons and my internal job scheduler. (API Keys, Pheal API Library).

Switching to Pheal as API Access Library

• In the past my update daemons used Curl, SimpleXML and file based caches to request API data and update DB constantly.
• Pheal makes the access easier for me  (since I’ve my own database layout). I even added a couple features to Pheal (like archiving and logging).
• Before running into religions library discussions: The switch from plain SimpleXML to Pheal it just felt natural to me. I have full control and access on the API attributes while the access to complex api results with multiple rowsets was getting  easier, so I could keep 80% of my update functions and my database layout.

JavaScript Framework change

• In the past 2+ years I’ve relied the Prototype Framework very heavily. But even the fact that Prototype 1.7 was just released it feels a bit like “riding a dead horse”. So I took the opportunity and rewrote/re-factored my complete JavaScript stuff and converted the whole page to make use of widely used jQuery + jQuery UI Framework.
• At some points I was close to put everything down cause I was running into cross-browser CSS problems again, but good right now.

What does that mean?

You can see, there’s not much going on the surface and all above is only running on my testserver, not on the live version. But in general the overall cleanup, refactoring, reorganizing of the backbone and libraries of DOTLAN EveMaps should make future development and additions for a lot easier for me. Sure, I’ve a couple small features a ready, but I’ll will keep working on the rest trying to get a bigger update ready in the near future and of course testing it over time. At the same time I hope for new public APIs/improvements.

Btw: Keep up the the good work on the API CCP recently, please don’t  stop now!)

Btw 2: I booked, my fanfest flight and hotel for march a bit ago. Feel free to buy me a beer in Iceland 🙂