GNOME AniDB Applet

[IM]

Hi, I'm a Linux C++ programmer. I use your site quite a while now and it's really great, that's what I call a database. No let's get down to business:

I don't know how many of you are using Linux, neither do I know how many have GNOME as your default window manager...who does will know what I'm talking about. I want to write a GNOME Applet for the GNOME Panel (like the Windows taskbar in windows, just more useful ). The applet should basically show you your MyList and notify you if something new has been added as a release to a particular series that you have in your list. An example:

You have Naruto in your MyList and have 40 releases (episodes) from subgroup X and subgroup Y, now if something new is released from a one of these groups (episode 41 from group X) the applet should notify you.

I hope you find this idea interesting, I would like to hear some more ideas if you have suggestions please write them down.

Now the technical stuff (some API questions):

Well I read your API reference, and since this is my first attempt to do network programming (I only did GUI programming for businesses applications...part time college job...being 18 isn't easy... ).
1. Is the UDP API capable doing what I'm planing?
2. I really don't get the picture of the database. Is AniDB based on a MySQL database or which type do you use.
3. Depending on which database you are using, how are we retrieving the data. I obviously have to know the name of the tables, if I want to filter out a particular series.
4. Do you offer some code examples, not just explanation how it works...in my case some C or C++ ones

I hope this wasn't a too long post but I'm very serious about doing this so I try to get as much info as I can...

So that's all from me...

[pelican]

1. Read the specification yourself to find out and contribute any suggestions for missing features at the wiki page. (The answer's "mostly", or "the important parts" if you are really too lazy to check.)
2. You're not meant to know the internal structure of the database, it's not public. Which engine it uses is however, and by searching this forum you could have discovered this. (No, I'm not telling you.)
3. No, you don't have to know the names of any tables. There is no access to the database except through a closed protocol which exp might give you access to if you show a need and the capability and will to write your application, but from what I understand it doesn't preserve table/column names anyway.
4. There's a thread which is mostly a list of UDP applications in this forum. If you want code (which you shouldn't need, it's very simple), you can look at the open source projects among them.

[ricce]

1. Yes and No, you can get notifies by the UDP API - its the same notify system that the webinterface uses but an other GUI. But you can't list mylist with the UDP API - fot that you can parse the html page from the webserver.

2. You don't need to know the exakt database tstrukture but it can be a good idea to know som basics of relation databases.

3. You can't resive data from the tables throw the UDP API if you don't know id or length/ed2k_hash - shortname for groups will also work

4. http://www.anidb.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2328 - im sure it at least one open source project there.


If you never have used the network API before I sugest you make some simple echo clients - in this case we use UDP (datagram) so make sure you understand the different between UDP and TCP (stream)