Introduction
============
This package come with some util and the vkontakte api.
If you simply want to use the vkontakte api. You should
only have to import it like this:
from vkapi.api import VKapi
Package contents
================
Small listing of directory and their purpose. If you
expect to dig in the code and submit some patch to
improve support for the api.
template/ : contains mako templates for api generation
util/: contains some utility needed for api generation
Dependencies
=============
* urllib
* urllib2
* simplejson
* pastescript
* hashlib
* BeautifulSoup (html/xml parser)
* mako (templating engine)
Most of the dependencies are python default.
Starting development
====================
In order to get all the requirements, it is highly
recommended to run a python application within a virtual
environnement. To make sure all dependencies are there.
Run the following command at the root of the package.
python setup.py develop
Installing
==========
There is no installation script at the moment. I have no idea
how it will be handled by pastescript. Good chance are that it
will work but don't expect it to update the vkapi by itself.
You'll either have to pull the project from git or update the
package by yourself. If you use the utility script to update the
api, it is at your own risk.
Notes
=====
I will explain some design choices. I started the project on 24th
of july 2010. I made a version of the VK api a couple months ago.
Without having access to the api, I had to manually add method
signatures in a dict that described each methods.
I inspired myself from the python facebook api. It generated classes
and defs at runtime. I made it and it worked nicely. Unfortunately,
having runtime generation of a whole api bring some problems. It is
hard to debug and inspecting code that is created at runtime is not
really easy.
I then decided to stop working on it since it wasn't exactly "that"
easy to maintaint. The code was fairly small but that wasn't important.
Two days ago, I found out that some wiki pages of the VK api are
available offline. I then didn't have to mess with cookie
authentication. I then decided to write a simple parser that will
download all the wiki pages that defined api methods.
All the methods are then saved in a dict for later use in a template
file.
I decided to create this utility in order to output the api into actual
code. The good thing is that since I build the api with a template,
it should be possible to create templates for multiple languages. That
should allow me to output the VKapi as python, plain json, javascript,
java, c++ or any languages that will have its own languages.
Since I use a template, to generate a working api file to any supported
language. People could submit patches directly to the generated file.
That way, I can or someone else will be able to fix the template.
To make things easy, I'd be happy to add some support for pastescript
like this:
paster buildapi [programming language or all]
paster package [programming language or all]
ISSUES
======
I am unsure of the encoding used by vkontakte...html says cp1251...
firefox says utf-8, decode both cp1251 and utf-8 but sometimes crash
with an invalid char with cp1251... Seems to solve the issue if I use
utf-8 even if the html says a different encoding.