[REQUEST] - Anime-Planet.com Web Service

[alexander]

Originally Posted by sothis

it doesnt work that way.

But it'd be fun if people thought it did!

It was a bad way to suggest not blurting things out immediately after joining. Sorry, holms.

[sothis]

Originally Posted by Drahken

Yeah, sothis doesn't have a heart, she replaced it with a cyborg fluid pump ages ago.

i lol'd

[holms]

Duplicate of http://www.anime-planet.com/forum/co...lanet-api.html

thnx for the link, I read it all.. too sad =(

Hackers and traffic it's all fairytales. usage of page would not increase infact. I wrote web service for IT company who have e-shop and who are[was] the main source of IT items in whole Lithuania =) 10% of traffic increased, and we even decreased traffic much more by limiting items in the list and have some timeouts and etc... but it's about 1 million requests per day with 100mbps traffic from we haven't used even 1/2 of it.

about hackers.. the post/get requests stays the same. so it's total non-sense =)

if AP would be developed as open project with open svn repository and everybody could participated, or at least limited participation, then there would be no problem about sothis time, [well just to check others source and accept/deny/correct]

Anyway to implement really basic web service is a 6hours of work for beta version =) it could be limited access, just for users who submitted to have access... most of that time would go to create api key generator and authorization, very good practice just to take amazon web service authorization scheme. it's very easy and secure.


as for now:
* sothis will not loose money because of traffic..
* no security nonsenses at least for read only version...
* sothis will have to spent a little time to create api and could ask for 1-5$ for having api key from developer or even every user who will use software.. if sothis really want to earn from her spent time on api implementation
* main sothis fear would be to gave away whole database, but timeouts and limited listing of items per day would solve this, there are tons of protections against this =)


so the question probably is about sothis time. if it's so payed well we could donate.. I'm sure lot's of people would donate to have API for AP.

I can't see problem in anyway =) unless it's really die-hard for sothis to program with php , and this would be REALLY time consuming task then. in this case, ofcourse it's better
spent "After job time" for your own life =)))

to alexander:
tons of people want to manage their collections and browse database on iphone, tons of app created already for FREE by volunteers like me. =} tons of people want to autoselect "as watched" with one click from desktop, or even after you finished watching anime over iphone [yeah there are tons of otakus who watching anime on iphone ;] If you will browse some otaku forums they have much more fantasies then I do and tons of them REALLY would even PAY for that =) so why we need api is out of question.

[sothis]

if AP would be developed as open project with open svn repository and everybody could participated, or at least limited participation, then there would be no problem about sothis time, [well just to check others source and accept/deny/correct]

just to clarify, anime-planet is not an open source project like anidb - it's a business, like MAL, and ANN. the reason being i am not able to work for free on the site anymore nonstop - the server costs money as do other things, eventually it would be nice for me to be able to earn even minimum wage for all the work i do on the site.

[alexander]

That's why I recommended to listen first...

Originally Posted by holms

could ask for 1-5$ for having api key from developer or even every user who will use software...

This might actually work!

[sothis]

potentially. i can look into it to see if it's a good business model, but micropayment type stuff like that or subscription models tend to not work very well, especially with the sort of community on anime sites who tend to dislike having to pay for stuff when they can get it for free. (i say that out of research that's been worked on for a few months)

[Ketsuron]

i could imagine that a low bandwidth version of the RecDB (wap.anime-planet.com) were more useful for checking during shopping

[holms]

Sorry to bump old thread. Just a short update on my experience and current situation in anime world.

What options do we have with open api nowadays? Anidb and MAL. MAL have some iphone app which is written by some kind of random guy just using their api and that app available only on US appstore =/ anidb don't even have iphone app although their api is really well made and requires tons of job to implement because it's on sockets only.

Second thing which I want to share with is that I've been working for the past 6 month in a company which have 2 millions unique visitors per day, and I've been developing API for that huge portal, and I can tell you with tcp&udp requests in total we used something less then 1gb of traffic per month, it's about 10k developers with 100k connections per day. Everything is highly compressed. And most interesting part that after some time we decided to make web based api just with post/get requests and dev api keys which saved even more traffic for us.

basically it's the same as I would create some web application where I only store user session and sending post requests with session ID in header =) is TOTALY THE SAME AS USING SITE WITH BROWSER , but 50x less consumable traffic for sothis on non-image existence and few basic text output like small array of anime data in json or xml. Web application part with sessions would be dangerous as sothis probably would ban ip after few days, seeing how many accounts it's using =)) Iphone app is safer, ip address for each sim card, basically same as using browser for sending post/get requests with session. Only problem is retrieving incoming information, I have to get all page in buffer, or at least write a crawler which would index whole animeplanet database (btw much worse method because you, sothis, will keep loosing sooo many traffic with every new app downloaded person). And this could be solved in just less then 2 days of work like: write god damned api which returns result in json or xml for each anime, if i'm adding some GET param in url (ofcourse this would be allowed only with API keys). And btw if you are using proper methods when your programmer were making this site, so jsong/xml output would be just 3 additional lines on your code, because you already passing array of data to your template right??? so just put that array to function which convert whole array to json or xml. that's it! DONE! This is soo easy in any language: php, python, asp - wherever this site runs on. it's just a 3-5 lines code god damned..

how much funds do you need for this? I could donate around 350$ this is just a 2-4 days of work not more. All you need is:

* API secret key generation for each user which should be entered on client side by user,
* Output search results in xml/json, anime by id result in xml/json,
* Return status of changes on watching/watched/staled/series count.
* Returning user information in json/xml of profile page
* Anime feed and owned anime (watched/watching/stalled list) in xml/json format.
* If you really so paranoid about traffic you can implement some limitations, and force to use clients only for anime organizing, nothing else, no anime list browsing.. only find anime by name, check if it's watched, and profile information with latest feed, THAT'S IT!

is that many traffic you would loose in here? 100x less then using your website itself!! It's so basic that I even don't know how this request can be denied, you becoming massive anime organiser which already competes with MAL. At current state I can write iphone app which will crawl all your database with each launch and this will eat I think plenty of traffic something like ~100mb per one time, the only way you can fight with this is to obfuscate your css clases, which will cost you more then writing api

[Drahken]

Never say anything to the effect of "it'd be easy", that just pisses sothis off.

On top of that, you come off insulting with lines like "if your programmer did it right" and "if you're paranoid". Then you come off very demanding about the whole thing. Then you finish it off with a veritable threat/ultimatum "well, I could just whip up an ap that would eat your bandwidth like candy & there's nothing you could do about it".

After a post like that, I wouldn't be surprised if you got banned.






btw Does anyone else find it strange that holms has a post count of only 1, despite the fact that he has 6 posts in this thread alone??

[AirCommodore]

I don't think this forum counts towards post count?