I have done a little programming in the past, so I am not a total noob to it. That being said, I would like to leverage my interest and experience to do more in Eve. I would like to get started with ESI APIs but to be honest, there is a huge gap between “3rd Party Developer” blog and actually getting my hands dirty with 1s and 0s.
Is there a way I can learn the basics of ESI APIs? What I mean by basics is, “Do I need an ISD to write this stuff?”, “How do I string commands together into an ‘app’?”, “I want to do what sites like ‘evemarketer.com’ are doing, but personalize it for myself”, and so on.
I made the mistake of asking this stuff in Eve Help Chat and I got the usual response… “Oh we don’t use APIs anymore… They have been discontinued” (facepalm)
To be fair, think most who hear/see API think of it wrong, API means “Application Programming Interface”. In terms of EVE: it’s a way for a Developer’s app to interact with EVE’s Database. EVE Swagger Interface (ESI) is an API, just like the old XML API and CREST is, the main differences between EVE’s former and now current API is the data-format that it returns. The XML API would return data in a XML-file which if opened with a text editor would be fairly easy to read. Can’t remember much about CREST so you will have to look up the documentation. ESI returns data in the JSON-format which is significantly different than XML.
In order to use ESI for your app or web you will have to register it on https://developers.eveonline.com/applications, without that you will not be able to pull data from EVE’s database. Once you have it registered it’s just a matter of making the correct functions for requesting data and tell it how the returns should be handled.
I also only know the very basic of programming myself so unfortunately I’m not much help to you. Been trying to learn bits of pieces here and there when I have some free time. I can do HTML, CSS and also know a little about making functions
I wish you good luck in your endeavor, and may a beacon light your path to success
You can test inputs and responses with it and without programming anything. It shows each query also as a cURL statement and will give you an idea how it works. From there can you then decide which programming language to use for it.
Here are some more links you should take a look at:
There are also excellent resources on the Tweetfleet slack. #esi channel, #devfleet, and #sso with CCP dev participation as well as many of the third party developers
