World of Warcraft

This is the specifications for the WoW Item component.

API specifications

Administration

User functionalities

Theming

This is the specifications for the WoW Realm component.

API specifications

Administration

User functionalities

Theming

This is the specifications for the WoW Guild component.

API specifications

Administration

User functionalities

Theming

This is the specifications for the WoW Character component.

API specifications

Character entity

The WoW Character component declares a Character entity. The entity is composed of the basic dataset returned when requesting the API with zero additional fields.

• realm: character's realm (in its slug version).
• name: character's name.
• level: character's level.
• lastModified: timestamp for character last modification date (service side).
• thumbnail: character's thumbnail.
• race: character's race. @see wow_character_races().
• achievementPoints: character's achievement points.
• gender: character's gender.
• class: character's class. @see wow_character_classes().

The following fields are added and used by the component:

• cid: the {character}.cid primary key.
• uid: the {user}.uid foreign key when a character is owned by a user.
• region: character's region.
• status: whether the character is blocked(0) or active(1).

This page is a description of the cover story and the necessary details. Specifications for each components are clear about what is defined and what is not defined. Furthermore, specifications indicate what areas are likely to change in the future. A specification is a difficult document to write, and it is more than just a paragraph or two about the component.

API Specifications

This API is build upon the RESTful service, full specifications can be found here: http://blizzard.github.com/api-wow-docs/. In its complete version, the Blizzard Community Platform API will make use of the entire service provided by Blizzard.

The base WoW component support EU, US, KR, CN and TW regions. The list of supported regions with miscellaneous information can be retrieved by the wow_api_info() function. The component is a sort of infrastructure for other components, declaring a wow_http_request() function that take care of service communication.

wow_http_request()

Test-infected development

Here is a very nice article written by Adobe on their Cairngorm 3 framework:

Test-infected developers never write their tests days after their code. Test-infected developers want to write tests, because that's the way they think about software development. They don't want to think otherwise. Test-infected developers never have excuses not to test. They are never too busy to test, their environments never take up too much time to create test data, and their customer never complain that testing is too expensive because it takes too much time.

If it is difficult to create an environment of test infected developers,

• analyze the design of the application for testable code, prevent repetitive and over-specified tests, keep tests small, easy and close to the way objects are used in production.
• don't attempt to test every single line of code in your application. Realize that functional tests have a role. Focus your unit tests to test behaviour and not structure and wiring.
• ensure libraries, frameworks, API projects, any other code that is shared by multiple developers achieve the highest coverage and quality of tests.