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It is time for public service - the web services boom

April 03, 2013

For the past few years websites have really grown and outgrown. If expired domains is any indication there are more websites born than babies on this planet everyday. Or perhaps more websites dying than people on this planet. Ok I made those stats up but hey 79% of all stats a re made up right?

Well what I have seen is that it is not websites that are becoming popular over the past few years. The trend has been towards services. I am not just thinking SaaS and stuff. Those are covered by “whitepapers” already. I am thinking nexusmods. A simple service to download game mods. I do run a fairly new games news portal and forum (like 3 months old… remember babies) over at http://gamingio.com My interest in games go far back…really far like 1985 far. I work on web services everyday at work but I want to see some websites so I make them. End of the day what really matters is the service, the value add. Websites have done that and it’s getting old. Stuff likes news, blog etc is done to death. There is still ample room for new websites with new ideas. The real winner is web service.

Steam DB is amazing ref: http://gamingio.com/2013/03/mortal-kombat-9-and-many-other-games-steam-achievements-spotted/ see the schema someone has drawn up. It has so much information to play around with. Steam has a usable web service.

Web services are becoming the norm for many hosted apps as well. For e.g. when I used zendesk or aws I barely access the site. Most of it is done via web services. There is no standard to these things and web services is still a lot of stuff to cover and everyone has their own idea of how to do things.

A few months back I started working on my own web service. Nothing big , just something I wanted to use personally inspired by nexusmods and steam db. Idea is to put together a database of games and mods and allow it be publicly accessible or data submitted, merged etc. Anyone can query it. I could enable file downloads as well and in my test so far it all works ok. I just don’t have any background in windows or software development to make a GUI anyway. Perhaps others can find it useful.

I don’t have any game data yet but I will be making the API publicly available. I am hoping to get volunteers to help fill in the gaps.

In the next post i will put up the URL and some sample queries. I dont yet have a way of letting everyone send game data for the DB but I can work on that.

Other thing I realized that the GamingIO forums does have an API from IPB (the forum software we use) but I haven’t looked into whether it has a downloads API.  Either one should work for my purposes though the forum one would be simpler.


You are welcome to connect with me. Abhishek Dujari
This is my archived blog where you will find content about early days of Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Development and Sysadmin.