We don't have good ETA. We all have day jobs, unfortunately. But I can tell you where I am.

Right now, Hubski is a monolithic Arc app storing data as flat files.

My current list looks something like this:

1. Write an app reading SQL and serving JSON over REST, as an internal API. This will serve things like /post/id rather than /user/posts, and is not only unwieldy as a public API, but also serves private data like mail.

2. Write a script to convert the flat files to SQL.

3. Convert the Arc code to read from the internal API.

4. Write an External API, with endpoints like /user/posts, /posts/global, /tag/, etc. Hard, because it needs authentication to serve private user data. Easy, because we'll already have an internal API app to modify, and data will be in SQL.

The internal API is necessary before an external API. It will fix scalability issues we're having, it enables and simplifies a lot of other features we want to add, and most of the work transfers to the external anyway.

I'm about 60% done with 1 and 2, bearing in mind the 80–20 rule. But again, I have limited spare time. I'm also on vacation next week, so I'm losing the next two weekends. I'm conservatively hoping to have the internal API deployed for most data in a couple months, and to have an external API by the new year. I know that's long, believe me, it frustrates me more than anyone. If this were my full-time job, I could have it done in two weeks, tops.

Incidentally, if anyone is super-anxious to see the new API and conversion code I'm working on, I could be persuaded to put it on github sooner rather than later. It's all Racket LISP.

Going thru the Arc code to release it is also on my list. But, writing new Racket is more fun than poring thru old Arc looking for security concerns.

You don't need an API. You can always scrape.