EVE Online and APIs

[Epidermis]

I am toying with the idea of creating a skin that will display EVE Online character info using the APIs provided by CCP, the game's developer.

For those not familiar with EVE Online, the APIs allow software and websites to read and display info for accounts and/or characters.

The API seems to work like a user name and password. When generated there is an ID and Verification Code.

Here's one of mine.

ID: 629654
Verification Code: KXfbOZeLhiHmwo0rKMWXEHFrkJwzRDNtRkq38iFVoVEPaZXecxi6kj5codRLcztw

Can anyone familiar with Rainmeter's workings tell me if the webparser or a similar existing component will be able to return info using the APIs? If so, I will dig in and see if I can make my idea a reality.

[Epidermis]

"api.eve-online.com" seems to be the page to authenticate with.

[jsmorley]

Nothing that is built into Rainmeter is going to be able to do this I'm afraid. WebParser cannot authenticate unless a site supports "http authentication" like "http://MyName:MyPassword@SomeSite.com", which an API like this is almost certain not to.

It would require either some addon application that could in fact log on to the site and somehow save the results to a text file (which you could then parse with WebParser in a skin) or a custom Rainmeter C++ or C# "plugin" that could handle the authentication and parsing of the data and whatever else is needed and return data to the skin as a meausre.

I don't have much other than that very broad advice to give you I'm afraid.

[Epidermis]

Bummer.

EVEMon is free software that allows the data to be exported into .xml and other files types, but the export is a manual process.

I think this is well over my head.

[MerlinTheRed]

You don't actually need to log in in order to work with the EVE API. If you know the API key, you can retrieve information in xml form by sending a html request that contains said api key and additional parameters that tell the api server what kind of info you want.
There used to be a documentation somewhere on the EVE websites but the API has been changed to a new system recently and the website is in the process of being overhauled so it might not be so easy to find that documentation now.
There are some Rainmeter Skins that retrieve EVE information already. Perhaps you can start from there by analyzing the following skin:

[ Direct Link ]