Why?

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Just a bit of background on why bobspace now contains a football database - and it's not that much to do with football.

If you have 5 minutes of your life to waste then read on, otherwise why not watch this?

Maybe six months ago I was looking for a way for bobspace to break out and connect with the WWW that lies beyond, and this I thought, could be satisfied by sourcing data from a third-party source, or as we in the trade call it, an API.

Creating a corner of bobspace that is built on the work of others and not just me - a collaboration.

Now, it’s not as it I haven’t used an API before, in fact bobspace is built on my bsv_2 API, but the ever-questioning parent on my shoulder wouldn’t be satisfied by that.

I required proof of the pudding.

And so, given the way my mind works, I built a generic utility to query any open API that (a) retrieves (as almost all do these days) a JSON data file and then (b) decodes and displays that file as an expandable/collapsible hierarchy, enabling exploration of the data within.

The capability to explore the thousands of APIs out there, was now mine. *

A tick in a box to be sure, but it felt like a “capability” and not a finished article, it didn’t concretely integrate bobspace into “something bigger”.

So here, without stopping to question myself, I crossed the Rubicon and committed to the creation of a finished article, the Football Database (phase I, for now) – reliant upon someone else’s API.

In retrospect this has been quite a lengthy journey, consuming a lot of time to build my web dev capabilities and add something new to bobspace.

Ultimately satisfying?

Yes definitely, but my satisfaction has been diluted, because although the technology is my creation the content is not.

A lesson learned - time to return to bobspace's core philosophy

Bob, Aug 2023.

* The API explorer is available via Friendspace.

Future Development

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On occasion the Football Database section will be extended, the job still has enough gravity to keep me in its orbit, or perhaps my completer-finisher is distracting me from following Newton’s First Law.

Either way, here is a rough outline of developments to come.

Phase II - League results/fixtures and tables for previous seasons (Sept 2023)

Phase III - Club Data, results/fixtures, season progression and attendance

Phase IV - English and Scottish Cup results/fixtures

Phase V - UEFA Major Competition results/fixtures and tables

Phase VI - Management functionality and interface (May 2024)

Technical Background

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All API calls for data made by the front-end JS are made to the bobspace API and not directly to the underlying, third-party API.

This ensures that my credentials for the source API are protected and, more interestingly, that the bobspace API can seamlessly draw upon both current (source API) and historical (my database) data sources.

The API also provides background functionality, processing and storage of current data into the database for future access.