Sanjay Shanbhag

Soccer API

What is it?

Soccer API is a RESTful Application Programming Interface exposing soccer data. Using this API, you get a host of things from, matches to league standings to teams to betting statistics and odds. What's more, you get all this data for all matches from 1993 to present day and forever into the forseeable future.

This API currently supports 22 European Leagues including 8 major leagues including The Premier League, La Liga, etc and 14 minor leagues spanning 8 nations.

You can head over to the Official Site for the exhaustive documentation and the quickstart guide to get you up and running quickly.

Features

22 European Legues supported
Match stats as well as batting odds
Betting odds for upcomming fixtures are supported too
User authentication with API Keys
Access throttling (Currently 100000 requests per 24 hours for a key)
Exhaustive Documentation for each and every route with code samples in 4 different langauges.
API Sandbox where you can play around with the data without having to writing a single line of code.

Technology Stack

The API was built using the MEAN stack. For those that don't know, here's what that acronym means:

MongoDB: NoSQL Database
Express JS: A NodeJS server framework
Angular: Front-end Framework (Used for Documentation and API Sandbox)
Node JS: Cross platform Javascript run-time environment.

This is my first major MEAN stack project as I had mostly used LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack for my previous projects. This was a welcome change as I wanted to switch things up and learn newer things. And as soon as I finished a course on the MEAN stack, I was craving to build something amazing with my newfound knowledge. And that is when I took up the task of building a complete API from scratch. The project that I wanted to work on for so long but had always postponed for the lack of my own skills to start such an undertaking. But here we are, the API is now complete and out there for all of you guys to check it out.

This was also the first time I used a front-end framework (Angular) for a large project. I had used React before to build a simple game, Clarividencia. But that was a significantly small undertaking, nothing complicated going on there.

As I had learnt Angular, I decided to use that in this project. And I have to say, I very much enjoyed working with Angular. There were a lot of challenges encountered along the way and the learning curve was very steep, but then I wouldn't have it any other way. I wouldn't call myself an expert on Angular yet, as it is a vast framework and my experience with it is limited at the moment this article was written, but I am certainly getting there.

This project has given me a lot of confidence and boosted me to learn more things.