theChrisWalker.net

So, got decided to join most of my friends and I got an Xbox 360. Me being me though, I got interested in the way that all the information about your “Gamertag” is stored an accessible on the xbox.com website. Wouldn’t it be fun to do something with this data!

As it turns out, I was beaten to the post by Duncan MacKensie (http://duncanmackenzie.net/Blog/put-up-a-rest-api-for-xbox-gamertag-data) who hosts a webservice to retrieve gamer data from Microsoft. I could find no details about how this service works, where the data comes from or anything! Either he has a relationship with Microsoft, or he scrapes xbox.com but either way, the data seems pretty consistent and reliable. Actually it turns out this information was right there on his website… http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/Blog/if-you-are-wondering-where-i-get-my-xbox-live-info So he gets it as part of his membership to the Xbox Community Developer Program.

However, the webservice is great, and returns XML which is fine, but I thought it would be more useful to me to have a PHP API for this data. So I wrote one which retrieves data from Duncans webservice.

Then I thought wouldn’t it be great to be able to use this dynamically in a webpage, so I wrote a service frontend which will return JSON formatted data. Then I thought wouldn’t it be useful to let other people use this as well, so I modified it and it can now cope with JSONP requests with a “_callback” parameter.

OK, so what does this all mean.

The PHP

The class is called gamertag and the usage is very simple:

which outputs something like this:

Array
(
    [Gamertag] => thechriswalker
    [AccountStatus] => Silver
    [State] => Valid
    [ProfileUrl] => http://live.xbox.com/member/thechriswalker
    [TileUrl] => http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/thechriswalker/avatarpic-l.png
    [AvatarFullUrl] => http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/thechriswalker/avatar-body.png
    [Country] => United Kingdom
    [Location] => Bradninch
    [Bio] =>
    [Reputation] => 58.72229
    [ReputationImageUrl] => http://live.xbox.com/xweb/lib/images/gc_repstars_external_12.gif
    [Zone] => Recreation
    [GamerScore] => 230
    [PresenceInfo] => Array
        (
            [Valid] => true
            [Info] => Last seen 12/29/09   playing Modern Warfare® 2
            [Info2] =>
            [LastSeen] => Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:35:22 +0000
            [Online] => false
            [StatusText] => Offline
            [Title] => Modern Warfare® 2
        )

    [RecentGames] => Array
        (
            [0] => Array
                (
                    [Name] => Modern Warfare® 2
                    [TotalAchievements] => 50
                    [TotalGamerScore] => 1000
                    [Image32Url] => http://tiles.xbox.com/tiles/Z+/tF/12dsb2JgbA9ECgQJGgYfVl5UL2ljb24vMC84MDAwIAABAAAAAPhq63g=.jpg
                    [Image64Url] => http://tiles.xbox.com/tiles/CE/Vx/0Gdsb2JhbC9ECgQJGgYfVl5UL2ljb24vMC84MDAwAAAAAAAAAP9eRRc=.jpg
                    [LastPlayed] => Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:32:52 +0000
                    [Achievements] => 9
                    [GamerScore] => 115
                    [DetailsURL] => http://live.xbox.com/en-US/profile/Achievements/ViewAchievementDetails.aspx?tid=%09%5d%3a%60m%2fl%3b%7cw&compareTo=thechriswalker
                )

            [1] => Array
                (
                    [Name] => PGR 4
                    [TotalAchievements] => 60
                    [TotalGamerScore] => 1250
                    [Image32Url] => http://tiles.xbox.com/tiles/Y1/qn/0Gdsb2JgbA9ECgR8GgMfWSlaL2ljb24vMC84MDAwIAABAAAAAP+IWnw=.jpg
                    [Image64Url] => http://tiles.xbox.com/tiles/DP/ST/12dsb2JhbC9ECgR8GgMfWSlaL2ljb24vMC84MDAwAAAAAAAAAPi89BM=.jpg
                    [LastPlayed] => Mon, 28 Dec 2009 16:59:25 +0000
                    [Achievements] => 5
                    [GamerScore] => 115
                    [DetailsURL] => http://live.xbox.com/en-US/profile/Achievements/ViewAchievementDetails.aspx?tid=%09%5d%3a%15%18*iAq%0b&compareTo=thechriswalker
                )

        )

)

So now we can easily get at the data. The source code for the class (which is not fully tested, but the basics work!) is at http://thechriswalker.net/xbox360/gamertag.source.php (NB it requires either PHP5 (for json_encode) or the PEAR Services_JSON class if you want to use the “getJSON()” method).

The JSON

PHP is well and good but what if I want to use a JSON/JSONP (JSONP is for cross-domain information requesting and is very useful for public information services, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#JSONP) request, well, that can be done at http://thechriswalker.net/xbox360/?gamertag=YOUR_GAMERTAG for the straight JSON or http://thechriswalker.net/xbox360/?gamertag=YOUR_GAMERTAG&_callback=YOUR_CALLBACK_FUNCTION_NAME for JSONP.

The first returns just JSON with a content type “application/json” and the second returns a javascript function call to your callback function with the JSON object as the only parameter and a content type of “text/javascript”.

These enabled me to build a simple Google Gadget to display a Gamercard:

I wanted this functionality for a project a while ago. I google’d and found that lots of others did too, but no one had done it. Or at least not in a way that I could understand. In fact, I’m not sure I completely understand it anymore. It works very well, but also it could have some improvement. I would like to be able to drag the mouse to create a selection, but this in itself poses the difficultly of how to distinguish a “drag-to-move” from a “drag-to-select”.

Still I found it an interesting proof-of-concept and maybe you will too. The test can be found here: Select and Drag Demo.

A little while back I was working on a project and wanted a selectbox to look a bit more pretty, but with complete backwards compatibility with regular select boxs.

I.E. If I already had a select box on the page, and it had various JavaScript events hanging off it already, I wanted that to function still but I wanted the box to be prettier.

The first idea was to use CSS to just style the box. But then I realised that each browser and OS has it’s own different way of rendering the controls. So I turned to JavaScript, and the always useful jQuery library. I wrote a plugin that will immediately transform any selectboxes into prettier ones, allows icons for the options, all with valid xhtml and works completely fine with JavaScript (or the plugin) disabled. Pretty cool, eh?

Well, I put the original demo page I designed for it back online, so check out the plugin!.