Get information about any country via a RESTful API | Hacker News Reader

Get information about any country via a RESTful API

restcountries.eu

44 pointsvaeke26 comments

This is nice if considered a programming exercise but it's actually pretty useless for real world use.

This data is static, that is it very rarely changes. The whole dataset is also very tiny. It's just better to store this data in-house and don't provide unnecessary point of potential failure by using an external service.

An idea on how to make it more useful is to provide downloadable data dump in several formats suited for immediate import into various data stores. An extra addition might be modules for popular frameworks providing access to this (local) data in all the ways your web service does.

I'm not trying to diss, just trying to find some value for real world usage. The service is neat otherwise.

The project where the data comes from actually offers dumps in three different formats: https://github.com/mledoze/countries

>> It's just better to store this data in-house and don't provide unnecessary point of potential failure by using an external service.

Isn't this the point of rfc2616 sec13? I haven't looked, but if there are etags etc then I think a computer is better than a human at looking for new data, no?

totally get your point. although there are cases when using an external service is actually more convenient. maybe riskier but still convenient. thanks.

"JSON Data is taken from https://github.com/mledoze/countries"

The data is cool, but seems overkill to do an HTTP call when the full dataset is 11K (gzipped).

Why not just publish a JSON file? It's not like the data source is that large or changes often. No reason to have an API for this

Apparently the data does come from a JSON file: https://github.com/mledoze/countries/blob/master/countries.j...

Some of the data seems to be incorrect:

http://restcountries.eu/rest/alpha2/za

The South African currency is ZAR, not SOS. Cape Town is the legislative capital, but not _the_ capital.

If you search by currency for ZAR:

http://restcountries.eu/rest/currency/zar

You get South Georgia. I assume that's meant to be South Africa.

And what about the Netherlands which has two capitals? A national capital (Amsterdam) and an administrative capital (Den Haag)?

And what about countries that use two currencies... oh wait, Cuba actually lists two currencies; never mind.

As a Dutch person I would say Amsterdam would be the correct listing as it is the official capital, which is what is listed.

SOS is the Somali shilling. It seems currencies for Slovakia (No idea what currency XSU is) to South Georgia have shifted one country down.

Same for "calling code". 44 returns Guernsey which is correct but I would expect the UK instead.

That's pretty awesome :) Simple and too the point. Nice project :)

You have "CZ,Ceska" as an alternative spelling, but in fact it is "Česká republika" or "Česko".

Especially since you have "AT,Österreich" for Austria.

Shall I submit it to mledoze/countries instead?

Edit: solved - submitted a pull request

(Disclaimer: I work for Mashape). I added this API to Mashape https://www.mashape.com/community/rest-countries-1#!document...

The callingcode endpoint only returns one result even when there is more than one that qualifies, as is the case with 1 and USA and Canada (and others that are part of the North American Numbering Plan)

Maintainer of the dataset here. Most of the inacurracies have been fixed now.

More data will come soon. Thank you for all the feedback, I appreciate it!

Pretty crappy search, query for "india" returns "British Indian Ocean Territory" as the first result.

ordering by "relevance" is coming =)

Obligatory warning: API is absolutely not restful.

But it even has "rest" in the URL! You mean that doesn't make it RESTful (rest-full?)

Since the project seems to have an educational bent, what would the proper REST interface for it look like?

GET:

http://restcountries.eu/rest/alpha/ee would be http://restcountries.eu/countries?alpha=ee

http://restcountries.eu/rest/name/norge would be http://restcountries.eu/countries?name=norge

That seems right, right?

Neither is more or less RESTful than the other. The media type and link relations express to the client what resource is being returned, not the URL itself.

Just wanted to add some thoughts on how one could try to make this RESTful. First, if it were me, I'd pick a media type that can express hyperlinks in JSON (since JSON knows nothing about hyperlinks), maybe something like HAL [1]. Next, I would define my link relations for this API, which in this case would be a collection of countries and the countries themselves (so at least two different types of resources).

After creating the representations of each of these resources, I would then create URI templates in my root response (I guess found at /rest) that allow for the searching aspect that this site is providing, which would be something like:

  { 
    "_links": {
      "search_by_name": {
        "href": "/rest/name/{name}",
        "templated": true
      }
    }
  }

I may build on to this to provide other resources, like a collection of capitals, each with a link to "/rest/capital/{capital_city}", or a resource of currencies, linking to "/rest/currency/{currency}".

The goal of all of this would be to tell the client how to find resources rather than having that hard-coded into the client. These are just some first steps toward being RESTful, and there are lots of different directions you could take this and still be RESTful.

edit: example was incomplete

[1] http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html

thanks for your input. i'll think about this

The capital of Canada is Ottawa, not Ottowa.

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