So I am taking a course in Web Information Systems which basically deals with new web technologies that help build up web services on the internet (much like Giantbomb). As our design project, we were supposed to build a web application that gets data from two different sources based on a user query and mashes it up together and displays all the information in one place.
The first thing that came to my mind when I started brainstorming about this project was the vague memory of Dave talking about Giantbomb having an API of some sort (I think it was last year or so when that happened). Anyway, a little bit of digging and sure there was this awesome API open to everyone to utilize the entire wealth of information present on this site.
I ended up mashing data from Giantbomb and Amazon.com. As a user, you could enter a search query, say "Batman", and the web app would go through the Giantbomb database and spit out ALL the batman games that have ever been published. The app was customized to grab information like which platforms it was developed on, the list of developers and publishers and the characters in the game. The Amazon API allowed me to show the top 3 search results for each game and their individual prices.
I don't have a hosting server right now for you guys to try it out, but I made a short demo video on Youtube if any of you want to check it out. I'd recommend watching the video fullscreen at 480p to be able to see all the text clearly:
Anyway, I guess I just wanted to thank the Top Men at Giantbomb for being cool enough to write up an API and give everyone access to their database without even charging us anything for this. It's amazing how much information is there on the Giantbomb database, I mean, there is nothing that even comes close on the internet to how much useful data Giantbomb has aggregated over the past few years ! So seriously, Snide and your team of engineers, I say .. great job good sirs. Had a lot of fun working on this project, and hopefully there are a few more good ones coming soon in the pipeline.
As a side note, here's a list of the tech used:
- Django framework for the web app. All code written in Python.
- Backend database was eXist, an XML database
- XML data parsed using lxml python lib
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