any free tablebase web service?

[pgn4web]

Hello,

is anyone aware of any free tablebase web service that I could use in an open source GPL project (a chess games viewer extension for google chrome, see http://code.google.com/p/pgn4web/wiki/B ... ogleChrome)?

What I'm looking for is a service that I could query (with javascript from my extension) sending a probe request with a FEN string as a parameter and receiving back the tablebase lookup result (mate in X, draw, position not found, error).

There's something here http://www.lokasoft.nl/tbapi.aspx but I could not make the SOAP request work with javascript. Other services like the one at the shredder website only allow manually entering the FEN string on a web page and don't seem to allow queries from a program.

Thanks.

[guyhaw]

Would certainlly be worth knowing if the Lokasoft URL is still live and usable ... anyone had any success with it?

g

[pgn4web]

Would certainlly be worth knowing if the Lokasoft URL is still live and usable ... anyone had any success with it?

the webservice seems fine, I tried with the python-suds library and this script works:

Code: Select all

from suds.client import Client
url = 'http://www.lokasoft.nl/tbweb/tbapi.wsdl'
client = Client(url)
result = client.service.ProbePosition('8/8/8/8/1p2P3/1k1KP3/8/8 w - - 0 1')
print result

my issue is that I need to access the service from javascript and the only javascript client I found (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/ajax/Java ... lient.aspx) fails

[ernest]

knowing if the Lokasoft URL is still live and usable ...

Live: yes http://www.lokasoft.nl/tbapi.aspx

Usable: not sure (only 5-men...)

[Kirill Kryukov]

Why not just request the page through HTTP and parse it? And if your software makes so many requests that parsing speed becomes an issue, then I guess the database server owner won't be very happy with the load you generate, and the server side will become the limiting factor.

[pgn4web]

Why not just request the page through HTTP and parse it? And if your software makes so many requests that parsing speed becomes an issue, then I guess the database server owner won't be very happy with the load you generate, and the server side will become the limiting factor.

If a site provides a public API like the lokasoft site, you can count on the site owner being happy for you to use their site as a tablebase service and also you can expect the format of the API to remain the same and your code to get the info to work.

If you reverse-engineer a site and manage to extract the tablebase assessment parsing the HTML of the page, then you have two problems: the site owner might not be happy their site being used that way without permission and the layout of the page might change, breaking your routine to parse the tablebase info.

[QuakePhil]

I find this service useful: http://www.k4it.de/index.php?topic=egtb&lang=en

But as you say, you need javascript access. I'm not sure what that site offers besides FEN input..