Hi all,
For those of you in jurisdictions where access to gambling sites is
illegal, you may want to skip this message/thread.
Betfair is the world’s leading betting exchange site at http://
www.betfair.com and within the UK has shaken up the bookmaking
industry in interesting ways. If you don’t know what exchange betting
is, google for it as it’s too big a topic to discuss here.
Some years ago they introduced an API service at http://
api.betfair.com which was initially launched at the rather steep
price of £100/month for ‘read’ access to market data and £200/month
for access to be able to place bets. I originally was on the beta
program but didn’t get very far in developing a library before these
charges came in. Most implementations I’ve seen have been in .NET and/
or are commercially available only for very high fees.
There is now a free version of the API which limits the number of
transactions that can be conducted per minute. As a result,
development of a library is now not going to be a financially
prohibitive exercise. Since the beta program ended, I’ve discovered
Ruby and am thinking it might be worth giving this another go.
I was wondering if anybody had been working on developing a library
and associated suite of tools for the API in Ruby, or if anybody
would be interested on working on it with me? A WSDL file is
available, but last time I tried to auto-generate any proxy classes
it broke in interesting ways, and as I’m not too familiar with Web
Service client development in Ruby, I was wondering if anybody would
like to get involved?
The project I have in mind is to develop a suite of tools to be
released as open source (MIT) that would allow users to integrate
Betfair market data into their own projects, develop bots in Ruby and
for me to better understand web services using one of the most
complicated API services available on the Internet today.
If other exchange sites develop similar API products (or they’re out
there already and I’m not aware of them), it might be possible to
extend this project so that arbitration and multiple-site market
management scripts can be easily produced.
Anybody else interested? If so, I’ll get something set up on
Rubyforge.org in the near future and we’ll get rolling.
Hi Paul,
I’m writing an application that uses the betfair api for a friend of
mine. As part of this i’ve put together a very simple library to talk
to their SOAP api. If you’re interested in using this i’d be happy to
contribute it. At the moment it only directly supports the read-only
services as those are the ones I need, but the wsdl classes and
session handling are taken care of, which is certainly what took up
the most time.
I’ll have to ask if I can open-source it first, but I don’t imagine
that will be a problem.
Paul,
this sounds like a great idea for a Summer of Code project. If you
agree,
it would be great if you could email me and we could try to work out a
plan
of sorts. I’d have to submit my application (with a proposal) by
Monday, so
its somewhat time sensitive.
Thanks,
–Tyler P.
Anybody else interested? If so, I’ll get something set up on
I am a Ruby Summer of Code mentor and I doubt we mentors would approve
of a project like this (I won’t at least.) Maybe I’m being puritan or
something, but I imagine there are other more pressing projects than
interfacing Ruby with a betting site.
Just to let you know…
Ryan
Hmmm… chances are you are right, although I don’t know that the choice
of
open source projects has even been about “pressing need.” Go look at
the
list of CMS’s on wikipedia and you’ll see what I mean. That being said,
I
do respect your opinion and am glad you posted it because I would like
to at
least have a chance of getting approved, so I think I’ll drop the idea
as an
SOC project.
Ciao,
–Tyler
On 5 May 2006, at 20:00, Nick Dainty wrote:
I’m writing an application that uses the betfair api for a friend of
mine. As part of this i’ve put together a very simple library to talk
to their SOAP api. If you’re interested in using this i’d be happy to
contribute it. At the moment it only directly supports the read-only
services as those are the ones I need, but the wsdl classes and
session handling are taken care of, which is certainly what took up
the most time.
I’d certainly be interested in seeing that if possible Nick - adding
the write functions should be relatively trivial now you’ve got the
read functions handled.
To be honest, one project I’m thinking of would only need the read
functions, so anything you’ve got would be useful. I’m as interested
in seeing some example code for an API I’m familiar with to
understand SOAP and Ruby better, as I am having some functional code
to be honest.
I’ll have to ask if I can open-source it first, but I don’t imagine
that will be a problem.
If you could, that would be great.