User blog:Taldin/Building An Interface, Ruminations

(Techie Tuesday post!)

I've been a tinker for many years. Since I got my first taste of programming in elementary school, I've had a love-hate relationship with programming. I love the design part; that mad scientist dreaming-while-awake mode where you envision what your program-to-be and what it will do, but I hate the part where you have to debug the darned thing when it doesn't do what you expect it to do. But then there's nothing like the thrill of victory that comes from finally getting it working - and then you decide to improve the base working program.

Programmers come in two types, in general: inventors and fixers. Inventors craft new ideas out of nothingness; fixers see bugs and rush in to stomp them.

I'm a Blacksmith by way of the latter, for the most part; I started out by fixing a minor typo that I found in the dialog, followed up with a discovery about the code that was interfering with a piece of gear being awarded from a quest, and then tried my hand at creating new code.

My latest challenge comes from the fact that we no longer have any easy way to adjust a character using the API; we used to have the Swagger UI page, but that's been replaced with a non-interactive page.

I've got a PHP book here, and I'm thinking of making a PHP interface to curl in order to send messages to the server. To that end, it's got to have some sort of template (a way of quickly creating new items), a way of entering the user's API key (unique to each player and required) and then prioritize the list of what I want to work first.

There are a lot of API calls.

They come in the following categories: I'm going to hazard a guess and say that each of these follows a hierarchy pattern, so I can probably work with one group at a time. I already have a command line call-response thing going, so the only thing I really need is a front end that will run things with variations allowed. Hence, PHP for a form.
 * Challenge - create, delete, export data, get by ID, join, leave, list user's challenges, select winner, update
 * Chat - group chat-related stuff
 * Content - get -everything-
 * Coupon - (probably not touchable)
 * Data Export - (self-explanatory)
 * Development - (also not touchable)
 * Group - (party-related stuff)
 * Hall - (for the Hall of Heroes)
 * Meta - (get paths... not sure what this is)
 * Status - (API status, not needed)
 * Tag - Tag-related stuff; probably can use this
 * Task - Definitely need this
 * Unsubscibe - ...from email or user notifications.  Probably not needed.
 * User - Adjusting the character, buying stuff, getting stuff....  The core of what I want to work with the most.

That's the basics, anyway.

Now to set aside some time to program....

Taldin (talk) 00:10, September 21, 2016 (UTC)