This week in leaguevine-developers (3/19/2012)

[Mark Liu]

1. Huge changes to Leaguevine-Ultistats

2. Changes to the API

3. API resource visualization

4. AUDL starts April 14th

1.

Chad has been doing an incredible amount of work on Leaguevine-Ultistats over the last few weeks. Not sure when he sleeps. Many parts of the app are beginning to stabilize so it is becoming easier and easier for newcomers to jump in and contribute code. For those of you interested in getting involved in this project either now or in the future, I'd recommend doing two things. First, go watch the repo:

https://github.com/leaguevine/leaguevine-ultistats

Second, check out the existing version of it and play around with it. In places that you think are bad and need improvement, file bugs on the github issues tracker. Seeing as this project is so young, there should be tons of things you want improved. If you find an issue you think you might be able to tackle, you should fork the repo and just fix it. We'd love to see some good pull requests. Here's the link to the development version of leaguevine-ultistats that you can click around in:

http://ultistats.playwithlv.com

Our conversation around this web app has moved away from this group and onto the github issues tracker. So please go there to get the most up-to-date info.

2.

There are a bunch of notable changes to the API and it's documentation.

• The Events resource no longer requires you to specify the player for an event if you don't know which player was involved. You can just specify the team instead. Please see the docs for this.
• OAuth2 now uses long lived access tokens. Similar to Facebook and Foursquare, we now issue access tokens that last for a very long time (5 years). In the future we will give you more options for types of tokens you can request, but for now, you automatically request the most powerful type of token available - it lasts 5 years and gives full read/write access to all resources. 
• OAuth2 no longer uses refresh_tokens. These are a hassle and many popular OAuth2 providers don't include them so we won't include them in our Leaguevine OAuth2 implementation.
• OAuth2 has a mobile interface for logging in or creating accounts which makes integration with leaguevine-ultistats nicer.
• More good sample API usage thanks to Chris Schaffner!
• Better timezone support for location aware resources. Times are always returned in ISO 8601 Format still, but instead of always returning them with the UTC offset (+00:00), they will be returned the offset of the appropriate timezone. Thus, if a tournament happens in New York, the time for the tournament resource and all games within the tournament will still be an ISO Format string, but they will be using the New York time with the appropriate UTC offset.

3.

If you are interested in a more visual representation of how the resources are connected, I constructed this diagram:

http://playwithlv.com/media/images/api/leaguevine_api_schema.jpg

4.

Finally, the AUDL starts on April 14th! I've been talking to Josh Moore (the guy running the league) a bunch and they're pretty pumped for these stats. We still have quite a ways to go, but we're on pace to get something functional to them by the time the league starts. 

Since we'll be writing a ton of core code very quickly to get things ready in time for this league, there will clearly be bugs. So please report any bugs you see by going to our github issues tracker!

The development branch you see on playwithlv (including ultistats.playwithlv.com) will be moved to the live leaguevine.com branch on April 10th. 

-Mark

p.s. It seems like right now I'm sending out these "this-week-in" emails every 3 weeks or so but that will increase as participation in this group increases. There may have been just enough things to update you on last week but it was borderline so I decided to be lazy and wait until today for a bigger update. Let me know if you'd rather have frequent smaller updates.

[Mark Liu]

The link in this email to the API resource visualization doesn't work anymore as we've moved all our static resources onto AWS. Here's the new link:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/leaguevine/images/api/leaguevine_api_schema.jpg