Planetarion Forums - For the techie types regarding scans.

This would certainly save you guys bandwidth--though not too much. I'd imagine any decent developer out there would just parse out the values and treat the rest of the data as junk. It'd save the time between the data transfer from PA<->Tool and vice versa by removing the bytes saved from Google Analytics, CSS links, etc. But the incentive for developers is really not there to make the changes now... Mabye if you're creating a new PA tool, but going back and changing the code now is kinda useless. It's not like any PA tool gets anywhere near a fekload of traffic that they'd be trying to make that kind of efficiency changes.

What I'd personally like to see is a PA XML API. If this were done, we'd certainly see a new generation of planetarion integration and tools. Take the XML ship stat dumps you guys offer currently and then combine the information with various other XML feeds (static and RPC). If you guys are looking to save bandwidth, the XML version would be the way to go (you'd completely get rid of those useless [to parsers] HTML tags)...

If I were developing PA tools, as part of a PA XML API) I'd like to see some of the following:

- static feed of xml ship stats (already exists)
- static xml feeds which update each round with tech tree / constructions / possible scan values / etc.
- XML RPC of a scans feed (would take the scan_id as param)
- developer api keys / authentication on an alliance level which would allow an RPC for lists of reporting incs, statuses, update notes, etc. on the alliance defence page via XML RPC