Web services for game content

[Azhrei]

From this post...

Ha! If only the PRD supported webservice calls, I wonder if I could get someone to look into finding a webservice API to point some macro functions to that would benefit not only PF folks but 4E folks and any other company going that route!

"We don't need no stinkin' SOA. We've got XSL and regex."

Really, web service calls are not required. Their only advantage is that there's no formatting -- just data. That makes it easier to process them. But a little bit of XSL will do the same thing and it doesn't require any support on the part of Paizo.

I've already got XSL that works to extract the information from d20srd.org -- I can't imagine that tweaking it for the PRD would be very tough, although I'm sure Paizo's format will have its own vagaries.

It might be interesting to setup a web page where people can enter a URL and my XSL would try to extract the interesting information and produce an XML file as output. Then people could paste the Paizo URL into this other page and get XML out. But that doesn't really help for MapTool since macros can't directly consume XML anyway. So we're back to pasting statblocks...

[Hawke]

I hadn't really considered using an outside source to get it going. I do (or did) know my way around PHP and if I really wanted to I could probably re-figure out how to do the API for DDI and then still paste it in.

I dunno why I'm so obsessed with some sort of built in idea Just seems like it'd be neat and sweet.

[Azhrei]

Yeah, no doubt it'd be neat.

But it's not part of the core functionality for MT so nothing so specific will ever make it into MT. (At least, not on my watch. I can't say the same thing for anyone else. )

Now if it were somehow a generic feature that could be used for a large variety of other things, or if it had general applications for a lot of different games, then maybe. But then that's exactly what XSL is for, so...