Show HN: SWAPI – A Star Wars API | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SWAPI – A Star Wars API

swapi.co

79 pointspaulhallett56 comments

Check out the author's blog post where he explains his motivation: http://phalt.co/if-you-have-data-they-will-consume-it/

Is there a reason you're not using numbers in the json output?

    "vehicle_id": "1"

is better represented as:

    "vehicle_id": 1

What if the integer exceeds the maximum allowed on 32 bit machines and you try to decode the JSON?

That has nothing to do with JSON, which allows numbers of arbitrary size.

This is mostly just a typo in the examples I put, but I will consider using only strings for this type of stuff, to avoid issues.

Given the dataset you have to serve, I don't think you'll be having any issues if most of the JSON parsers give you 32bit integers.

I usually do the same thing. Both the 32-bit issue (that issue being with JSON libraries, not the spec) but also: IDs are opaque tokens. If down the road it makes sense to use UUIDs or have a sharding hash or something else, you don't want clients tied to expecting an integer datatype.

I feel like a lot of people will see that an just cast it to an int however.

That could happen but in a lot of strictly typed languages it would be non-obvious and special effort to do so.

There's absolutely no justification to send ints when you have any reasonable chance of needing to change it to a string later. Besides, IDs in a public API fundamentally are not numbers. You don't add them, subtract them, multiply them, shift them, inspect any property of them besides equality, or anything. They're opaque tokens used to identify things with the server.

Can I use the API to figure out that, for instance, the x-wing is /vehicles/1 and Mustafar is /planets/7? Otherwise, how would I know?

As well as ID, we'll do some fuzzy matching on the URLs as well, so

GET /api/vehicle/t-65-x-wing

and

GET /api/planets/mustafar

will also work

This doesn't work on pokeapi.co

PokeAPI is getting an update - http://phalt.co/if-you-have-data-they-will-consume-it/

and it will have better fuzzy matching.

I think it would be nice to also provide an endpoint that lists all the resources as an array of objects where the key is the id and the value is the name. Maybe something like this:

  GET /resources/ships
  [
    { 1 : "Tantive IV" },
  ]

So RESTfully, I think this is normal. You should be able to call a resource and then be fed back all of those resources (usually paginated to say, 20 per request).

It will have this style of lookup.

Do you mind discussing how you did the fuzzy matching?

My initial guess would've been dynamic programming (levenstein distance), but if this is API-wide, did you make a suffix tree?

I was so excited and then equally let down when I realized it wasn't online and this is just a coming soon page. Oh well, I signed up.

We're working on it, sorry!

No worries and thanks for building it. You may want to put the email capture above so it's more clear as I'm probably not the only one to copy pasta the url in the examples and be confused for a moment until scrolling to the bottom.

Good point. I set the URL config to catch all URLs and redirect back to the home page (anticipating people would try the API).

Once things die down I'll push up an update. Getting a heavy bit of traffic right now.

Any reason why this is an API and not a data dump?

I guess the main reason is that data dumps are sometimes hard to sift through, can become inconsistent (if there are multiple copies) and because from my experience, if you provide an API for something, someone will use it. On the flip side: I've found that often people have always asked "why isn't there an API for that?"

And of course, you can easily get a data dump from this by just cURLing all the resources and storing them :)

You don't really want to have to download potentially gigabytes of data to find a few sets of results!

Local caching will be the way to go.

All resources will have a "date_updated" or similar attribute which you can check against.

Ahh, if only HTTP had defined a standard header for checking if the requested content has been modified, and sending a specific status code if that's the case...

"potentially gigabytes of data" is now a microSD card smaller than my thumbnail, or alternately the cheapest instance on AWS.

Not encouraging to see a basic error right on the front page: "From all six Star Wars films"

Couldn't resist... ;-)

Check the bottom of the page ;)

We'll have episode VII details as and when it gets released.

I'm pretty sure it was a jibe at the fact that only 3 real Star Wars live-action films were made.

Ah, you didn't see the film_id & episode_id reference in the second example?

I feel like somewhere, somehow, a point is being missed.

Paul, it's awesome. I'm just being snarky.

As @simonsayscode points out, some folks aren't big fans of Episodes I, II, and III. Here's hoping for a fun VII.

Signed up. This is going to be great for conference demos.

:D My other API for Pokémon is also great for demos and teaching APIs - http://pokeapi.co

I Virtualized this API just for kicks - https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/planets/... and https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/vehicles...

Would love more details and I can make a Virtual Copy of the whole thing.

Built it here https://vapi.ca.com

Added Films and People now https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/films/6 https://vapi.ca.com/vapi/api/Vapidemouser/Star_Wars/people/1

This is amazing, all I need is a reason to mash http://pokeapi.co into this

Hi Mike, this is Paul, I am making this API too :D

Yeah I know, I'be even used PokeAPI at a hack before. It's MusicHackDay soon, I may have to use it again as a reference for poke chiptunes

Please do :D

Hah! I'm in need of just this sort of API come January, what are the odds? Awesome, hope you launch soon!

ETA is end of January :)

Where are your getting the data?

Good ol' scraping from websites like wookiepedia.

And watching lots and lots of Star Wars.

I have the blurays, so I should be in for a fun experience whilst collecting the nitty gritty data.

Do yourself a favor and get the Despecialized Edition.

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS-...

Oh that's a good point. Do I want my data to be consistent with the 1997 releases or the originals!?

If it's "All The Star Wars data [We]'ve Ever Wanted," then I want both. With tags telling me which data is 'original' and which changed in the '97 releases.

EDIT: And a donate button so I can reward you.

These are excellent. The little 'making of' documentary clip had me wondering what the fuss was about with the colour changes, but once I started watching I really appreciated it. Feels like popping the old VHS tapes in, but with modern resolution. Never knew how much it bothered me wondering if what I was watching was how I'd seen it originally (for the less obvious changes).

Han shot first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_shot_first

Totally ridiculous, but awesome at the same time.

Make that API great!

Whats the backend?

Hey! Thanks. I made the Pokémon API as well - http://pokeapi.co

The backend on that is Django. I might stick with what I know, or build SWAPI in Go. At the moment, we're still very early stage, so we can choose soon.

Under which license is this data available?

The data is being scraped from sources online and by watching the films about a thousand times.

As the data is already available freely elsewhere, I won't be charging or keeping the data, I'll provide it just like I do on http://pokeapi.co

Thank you for what you're doing, that's awesome! I'd like to enlighten why choosing a license is important.

Many people can be picky about the license, because even though you may be full of good intentions, the data you provide is non-free as-is in that it can't be reused elsewhere. Having a license is the clean, boring way to tell everyone "do whatever you want with this data".

That's even a problem for Github, or more precisely Github users, because many people push some code without any explicit license, making this code hardly usable by default: it may be available but you don't know if you have the right to reuse it, even if the developer said "yeah, use this as you want". That's not enough. Just because the developer didn't take a few minutes to select and put a LICENSE file.

It is also important to think about it in the other direction: If you're going to take content from Wookieepedia, their license is CC-BY-SA (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Wookieepedia:Copyrights), which means that you MUST say it comes (at least partially) from them (not that you wouldn't anyway) and that you MUST redistribute your content with a "similar" license. Even though you may think that everything is fine, there are some actions to do on this side.

Now, I'd understand that if only "amateurs" come and play with the data, we're all among good behaving adults and all is fine. But you may not be able to predict what will happen with how data is used, so unfortunately this step is important.

Personally I don't like restricting people, so I try to use CC0 as much as possible. Be aware that Creative Commons licenses may not be best suited for data (they were designed for work of art primarily), as can be seen by OSM's decision on the matter (http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/We_Are_Changing_Th...) so you may want to avoid them.

Note: I'm not even talking about money, which is an orthogonal problem.

Luke Sykwalker

Good spot!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com