Third Party Developer Blog

Greetings Developers! Yesterday was a day of some disruption to ESI, for which Tech Co apologises. During the process of resolving yesterday's issues it was necessary to discard the DNS entries for esi.tech.ccp.is. As a result, ESI was for approximately 20 hours only available on https://esi.evetech.net/ The esi.evetech.net URL has been the standard URL for ESI for approximately 6 months now, and the redirect from tech.ccp.is has been in place as a courtesy to allow developers some time for transition. It seems that Tech Co's communication on this matter has been below our desired standard and although most developers made the switch some time ago, not all developers were aware. For that too, we apologise. For reference, the matter has been discussed on the #esi tweetfleet slack and was alluded to in a dev blog but was only explicitly stated in ... read more

For every new EVE Online release, the Audio and Graphics Group delivers the ImageSet: a collection of graphic files available for use by the community. The ImageSet changes as assets, icons, and brackets are modified, as well as when the tools we use to create those images improve. Through the August release, incorporating those improvements has not required any changes to nomenclature of existing files within the ImageSet itself. This will change with the September release. Due to a series of fixes, the ImageSet Bracket folder will be dramatically modified to include brackets in use in the client while older unused brackets will be removed. Almost all previously existing icons will have new names, the number of icons in the folder will increase from 19 to 222, and we will begin to provide ship bracket icons in both 16x16 and 32x32 pixel ... read more

Greetings developers. As you all know, the ESI API is a shared resource among all of New Eden's citizens, and we work closely with developers to foster good practices and ensure everyone has equal access to it. Team Tech Co has for some time now been monitoring the usage of the /search/ routes, and we are sad to report that several developers are placing disproportionate load on the search service in order to achieve goals that it was never intended to serve. The goal of the search endpoint is to allow developers to upstream the searching for and autocompletion of the names of various types of entities in the eve universe. This saves third party developers the trouble of implementing their own search whilst also providing a more comprehensive search experience, and makes life better for everyone. Unfortunately, some developers have for some time ... read more

ESI Quick Reference For New Developers This blog post is part of a series of blogs examining best practices for ESI development. Each blog will be published on the 8th of each month during the journey towards XML API and CREST’s termination date. The legacy APIs will be terminated on May 8th, 2018. With the recent announcement that ESI has now reached parity with XML API and CREST there will undoubtedly be newcomers to ESI (welcome!). A lot of important information about ESI is strewn about in various blogs and may be overwhelming to newcomers. This blog will act as a quick reference for the most important things every new ESI developer should know listed all in one document. What is ESI? A RESTful API for EVE built using the OpenAPI 2.0 specification. ... read more

Breaking Changes to /characters/names and /corporations/names Over the past day it has come to Team Tech Co's attention that a few ESI routes are backed by poorly optimized software patterns. Some of these routes can and will be fixed with no disruption, but not all of them. Now that Team Tech Co. is aware of the problem we want to rectify it swiftly. On Monday, June 18th 2018, we will be removing four routes. Two of these follow our standard promotion mechanism, whereby their legacy versions will be removed and their latest versions will be served on both latest and legacy. However, it will be necessary to remove two routes that, up until now, have been considered fully functional (albeit with their functionality fully replaced by a different route). Of the routes you need to know about, they are: ... read more

18 months ago we announced both ESI and our intention to retire the XML API and CREST by May 8th, 2018. This is a reminder that this retirement date is finally upon us! Tomorrow after downtime both CREST and XML API will not be usable anymore. This means any software you are using that has not moved to ESI will stop working. If you need to find an alternative to your favorite XML or CREST-only tools you can have a look at this curated list of EVE third-party software maintained by our awesome community! The XML API was first announced in 2007 and was known as the "EVE API". The XML API was one of the first APIs to ever be released for a major popular video game and allowed the community to make ... read more

o7 Space Friends, CCP SnowedIn coming at ya with a blog detailing a recent change to ESI response headers. As some of you have already noticed (especially if you follow me on twitter, which you should), ESI now returns an ETag header in every response. This blog is to detail exactly what this means, and how you can use this in your applications to save yourself (and us) some bandwidth. What are ETags? Entity Tags are described in RFC7232. ESI strives to follow this RFC, and any violations should be raised as a bug on ESI-Issues. The tl;dr of the above RFC is there are two types of ETags, strong and weak. ESI can return either. For your application the implementation is the same, you should store and use the entire ETag header value without ... read more

ESI Chat Channel Deprecation Ever since EVE's new chat backend was released on March 20th the ESI route /v1/characters/{character_id}/chat_channels/ has been returning stale data. It has been decided to officially deprecate this route, meaning that it will be labelled as "legacy" and start returning deprecation headers. This endpoint will then be removed completely on May 18th, 2018. When will chat channel functionality be returning to ESI? At this point in time there is no ETA on the return of chat functionality in ESI or even what form it will take. All that is known is that it will look radically different than it did with /v1/characters/{character_id}/chat_channels/. You can be sure that once we know what the future of EVE chat will look like for third party developers that it will be announced here on this blog, so keep your eyes peeled! ... read more

This blog post is part of a series of blogs examining best practices for ESI development. Each blog will be published on the 8th of each month during the journey towards XML API and CREST’s termination date. The legacy APIs will be terminated on May 8th, 2018. March has been a busy month for ESI so this blog will cover all the ESI news relevant to third party developers from the previous month. A/B Testing As some of you may know if you follow our twitter or participate in the #esi slack channel, ESI began proxying a percentage of requests from its current cloud provider (Google Cloud) to its new cloud provider (Amazon AWS) on March 27th. The decision to migrate to AWS through means of A/B testing was ... read more

Upwell 2.0 ESI Structure Changes Greetings developers! If you've been watching our dev blogs you'll know that there are some upcoming changes to structures coming on February 13th. This blog will serve as a short summary of the changes that affect ESI and how ESI is going to accommodate those changes. These structure changes will also be the catalyst for the removal of two CREST routes. ESI changes to expect on February 13th Before jumping into the details of what is changing in game and in ESI, it is best to give a higher level view of which ESI routes are affected and how these changes will be handled. There are two ESI routes affected by these structure changes: GET /corporations/{corporation_id}/structures/ PUT ... read more