Comment by teleforce
2 years ago
This a great example on the usefulness of data availability via JSON API.
If the data is read only it's a GOOD thing especially for non-confidential data that are meant to be public, every government agency should open their public data like this.
Absolutely! My original plan had been to scrape their website using Selenium or similar.
I quickly noticed that they had employed lazy loading, which would have made that all but impossible. It took me a good few minutes to realise that if they had lazy loading, there had to be a backend, and I was overjoyed when I found out it was serving JSON.
All in all, it was probably much cheaper for them to have me hitting the API endpoint every minute than scraping the website even once a day