Starting a programming project with the EuroBillTracker api

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SeanW
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Joined: Tue Jan 04, 2011 11:33 am

Starting a programming project with the EuroBillTracker api

Post by SeanW »

Hi everyone;

I've known about the EBT API for a while but wasn't much of a web developer. But I've had an idea to promote EBT using this, basically I intend to develop a Facebook app that would allow players to enter notes on Facebook and in turn that the app would notify their friends that they're playing when they start using the app, and then more importantly use the ability of FB apps to post messages into news feeds to alert all the players friends whenever the player gets a hit.

The fact that I'm something of a junior developer seems to be getting in my way a little bit, as does the fact that I'm using Java Servlets instead of PHP, as does further the fact that I'm going to need some help with graphic design and animation if this project comes anywhere near to being a useful application fit to be deployed in the real world.

Unfortunately I've hit a snag very early, in that so far I have not even been able to make a login form work.

Long story short, instead of using a GET action to send data to api.eurobilltrackercom/aWholeLoadOfURLtokens I built a form and a sumbit button that (tries to) POST the whole thing to api.eurobilltracker.com i.e.
m=login
v=2
my_email=(my personal account details)
my_password=(my personal account details)

I expected it to POST back a phpsession, username, default city etc.

but instead what I got back was the browser went to api.eurobilltracker.com and showed me this:

Code: Select all

{"0":false,"data":[]}
Could it be that I made a coding error? Or because I'm trying this on a home hosted copy of Apache Tomcat behind an NAT/Firewall that the EBT API didn't know where to send data back so it just showed me that stuff under its own URL?
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avij
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Re: Starting a programming project with the EuroBillTracker

Post by avij »

I don't know exactly where the problem is, but the API does allow using POST for login. For example, the following two commands produce equivalent results:

$ curl 'https://api.eurobilltracker.com/?m=logi ... rd=hunter2'
{"sessionid":"95hmb4hm...","username":"avij", ... }
$ curl https://api.eurobilltracker.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; -d 'm=login&v=2&my_email=myown%40emailaddress.com&my_password=hunter2'
{"sessionid":"pe0d7puu9...","username":"avij", ... }

Perhaps you have some sort of encoding issues, like for the @ character? You could also consider POSTing all the data on one row, as above. The firewall is unlikely to be an issue here.
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