VGMdb API functions

[Hangman]

Hey there,

first of all congrats for this great website, I always thought that a vgm database would have been terribly sweet and useful. Thanks for your effort and please keep it up.

Now, turns out I'm a developer and I have a development-related question for you. I don't know if someone already asked this (I tried to search the forums with apparently no results), sorry if I'm repeating something that has already been suggested.
As you surely know, most databases these days offer plain text/XML functions to fetch data from other websites. These are commonly called "API functions" and appear on lots of new DB websites and social networks (the best example that comes to my mind is Last.fm: http://last.fm/api).

Have you ever thought to offer this kind of service? In my opinion it would really help to let VGMdb become the best vgm database around and would also make happy a lot of websites that need this kind of information and data.
Moreover it would be great to have one big and universal vgm database that anyone could refer to through a set of standard APIs.
Obviously the bad part of the story is that you'd need a lot of server resources (i.e. bandwidth) to achieve this.
I don't know what kind of budget you have but I guess you run this site as a hobby, and you don't even have banners and stuff to get money for the bills, so maybe this could really be a problem. Anyway, well, this is just a feature that I always think of anytime I come across VGMdb pages and I'd really love to see/use it.

I'd really love to hear what do you think about it.
Again, thanks for this website, I love it.

[Gigablah]

We'll definitely be having an API. There's a user-created utility that would benefit greatly from this (PhantomSnake's tagger), plus a few others have expressed interest.

There's a few things to work out though, the most important being the URL format of the API calls. Hopefully a standard will emerge once we get started on the database restructure.

[Hangman]

Great to hear this! Looking forward to use them as they come out. Thanks!

[Hangman]

Sorry for the bump; is there any news about this? Thanks!

[Secret Squirrel]

There's no real estimate for this. A lot of stuff was accomplished over the summer, including some database restructuring and album code reimplementation. That's in addition to the visible new features -- podcast, freedb lookup, media table, public website link submission, etc. Some of this stuff lays the groundwork for the public API, but there's still more to do, and some other big things that probably need to go first.

[Hangman]

Sorry for the massive bump (more than an year passed!).
Are there any news about this?

Thanks!

[Secret Squirrel]

No news. Nobody has had time to work on this yet, as it's always been a bit lower in priority than some of the other features.