User talk:Lotroadmin/Proposal: install the Semantic mediawiki extension/reply (8)

Ok, here's a related question... How easy would it be to craft a bot to suck over the data from data.lotro.com? .... data.lotro.com has some 43,000 entries !

Info on the API is on my page: User:Magill/Sandbox-4

Or... cut a deal with.... lotrodata.com which already does the data grab. Or with ??? (lotrocompendium?)

Looking at lotrodata.com home page, it appears that he "would like help."

Ditto the lotrocompendium: http://sourceforge.net/projects/lotrocompendium/ . What I don't know here is what is being use as a data source -- the "Compendium" itself is a plugin which displays the info, same as the tabs across the top of lotrodata.com.

The one thing, I think I know :) ... lotrodata.com does a real-time data grab. It apparently doesn't (I hate to use the word) Cache its' data as evidenced by the front page note:

"From time to time, Turbine takes the lorebook offline for maintenance. As LOTRO Data gathers all its information directly from the lorebook, it is possible that the cache of an article is expired while the lorebook has maintenance. As a result, the system can't grab the page and displays a blank page. An improved system that keeps the cache active while there is maintenance, is still in development."

This might just be an artifact of trying to get "the latest and most current" information.

I also have a program from Merlin (http://www.lostrealm.ca/tower/node/24) -- LOTROroster -- which is intended to be run on individual systems and to poll and grab data.lotro.com once a day. Potentially solves that issue, ignoring the fact that it will try to grab an update when you launch it... sigh.

So, what's the point... Simply, this would provide the data which then we could display in assorted templates. It would also allow Zimoon (or anyone) to "easily" generate his table of "weapons" on the fly.

=

All that said... I don't know SOAP... I'm only familiar with it from discussions I've heard, so I think that's what I need to know about... (My programming experience is FORTRAN IV and COBOL and both of those languages were long ago.)

The data.lotro.com api returns and XML stream... My browser, Safari, very nicely displays that in pretty indented, multi-colored xml format while telling me "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."

What I don't know how to do is how to grab that incoming XML stream and do something useful with it.