I have been working on a simple project to maintain a lot of data for the game Grepolis which I happen to like. I am just in one world, on the Dutch version, which is called Nu. And while playing this game is fun, I’ve decided to combine this kind of fun with another kind of fun: software development.

As it turns out, Grepolis provides a web API which allows everyone to collect data from every world within the game. So by using this API to import data to my database, and then use this database to feed it to my websites and other application, I can make some good use of this all. And it became quite practical.

But a fun project can grow to something bigger. So I decided to share my code at Google Code but this needs the code to be cleaned up a lot. This is supposed to show the best of my skills and if it looks bad, my skills are bad. I don’t want my skills to be bad. So by sharing the code I also hope to receive some feedback. Feedback is good. It’s nice to hear it looks nice. It’s even nicer when other people will show me the flaws in my work.

For now, the project has one owner, who will do all the hard work. This might change in the future, when the code has matured a lot and enough volunteers are available to help me with the code and the additional content. It doesn’t do much. The web site won’t even compile at this moment because I’ve changed too much in the database and business layers. I will be working on that, but first I need to get the datamodel just right, then make sure I have a working business layer. The most important part of this project isn’t displaying the data, it’s importing the data. And that’s not as easy as it appears.

UPDATE:

Since I quit Grepolis a while ago, I also stopped maintaining the code. It has been removed from Google Code and my copy of the code is lost in the catacombs of my enormous backup archive. For those who are still interested, I will try to find a copy of the code to put online.