roncli.com blog: LibWow...API? 0.5 beta

So I finally decided to drop the "Armory" moniker of what was LibWowArmory. It is now LibWowAPI to better match what it's a library for, namely the Blizzard WoW API. Yet, this version is a heck of a lot more than a name change.

The latest version now supports BNET authentication, provided you have an authentication key pair from Blizzard. The character profile got PvP and quest fields added to it. There are new classes for character achievements, guild achievements, quest lookups, and even battlegroup arena ladders. Item lookup is now fully supported as well.

Several properties got changed to become shared (or static if you're into that C# stuff), including the region and the language. I wrestled with this one for a while, as I wanted to give the library flexibility to change the region and language on a whim. However, making it shared allowed me to write a lot less code, and honestly I'd rather deploy the website as "us.something.com", "eu.something.com", etc. with each website controlling the value of the region and language in the Global.asax file. The resulting coding styles felt a lot more natural that way.

The headers got changed, as Blizzard is no longer using the LastModified header, but rather the IfModifiedSince header. Makes.. uh.. sense. I also send some of my own, though. X-Library and X-LibraryURL identify the library as LibWowAPI, and X-Application and X-ApplicationURL are exposed for the developer to identify their application accordingly.

I also decided to expose the Data property of each class, which gives you the JSON as returned by Blizzard.

Finally, this release is the first release with a binary distribution. Don't want to load the source? No problem, reference the DLLs and enjoy.

Once LibWowAPI includes auction data, I'm going to bump the version number to 1.0, drop the beta tag, and do a short screen cast on how to use the library via YouTube. After that, the sky's the limit with what you can do with this library. Enjoy!

Labels: Coding, Gaming, LibWowAPI, World of Warcraft

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