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Overview - APIs |
We currently run the following JSON API-endpoints. With these, you can get most info, that is displayed on iUPB:
- iUPB Navigator API
- iUPB Restaurants/Mensa API
- iUPB Transportation API
- iUPB Weatherstation API
- iUPB Courses API
- iUPB Timetable iCal Feed - not quite an API
We consider some APIs as public, where we generated most data ourselves or asked whether publishing the data is fine. Then, there are some APIs, where it is not so clear whether distributing the data (and not fetching it yourself) is ok – we consider those as private APIs that probably should only be used in apps targeted at iUPB or a subset of its features.
Note that we currently do not plan to introduce API tokens or any other form of user access control – the JSON will be served to anyone requesting it, for free, yippie! So, please do not hammer our servers with unnecessary requests, in other words: play fair! ☺
Some of our APIs support JSONP and thus are easily available for client-side use.
All APIs are read only and thus you only need GET requests. This also means you can try out the API-URLs in any web browser easily. ☺
All of our APIs send correct http headers to indicate when to refresh the info received (cache control public, expires, ...). E. g. information from the restaurant is stale after a couple of days. Some APIs might also return an ETag.
Read more about cache headers at this blog post.
For you, this means:
- if you use the APIs server-side: Cache data locally and use the http headers as a hint for when to expire the cache. By doing this, you save us many unnecessary requests.
- if you expose our APIs to end users via HTML/JS: Enable caching for your AJAX/JSON/JSONP library. jQuery can cache JSON according to our cache headers, as well as do browsers. By doing this, you not only save us many unneccessary requests, but also make the page load faster for your users.
The APIs are provided AS IS. We cannot assure the correctness of the data nor do we have some SLA or so. However, since iUPB uses these APIs for 2,000+ users a day, they are probably production-ready.
You might want to drop us a line if you are using one of the APIs, so we can inform you about schema changes (not all of our APIs are versioned).