FRC Events vs TBA APIs

[ProgBot]

I've been helping out with my team's scouting app, and while there is currently some integration with the FRC Events API, another team member and I talked about wanting to expand it. I realized that TBA also had its own which provides some different info which we'll probably want to look into. Does anyone have experience with both APIs that could explain what the differences are between them, and what could be looked for out of one versus the other? I.e. Does TBA have everything that FIRST provides, or are there certain pieces that it would be beneficial to query directly?

Thanks.

[plnyyanks]

What's your use case? I can try and tailor my answer to your specific problem.

[ProgBot]

Originally Posted by plnyyanks

What's your use case? I can try and tailor my answer to your specific problem.

I don't have much specifically in mind to be honest, I'm looking to see what the options are. I'm interested in pretty much any data, be it team info, match updates (I know TBA's webhooks would be nice for that), or whatever.

[plnyyanks]

Gotcha. The core datasets are basically the same. TBA gets its data from the FRC API upstream and serves it back out with some added goodies.

TBA has a larger historical archive, has some additional stats that you can get (OPRs, Breach/Capture stats, etc), and also serves match videos and robot images.

[Carl C]

I have been using the TBA API for small projects for the last three years. It is extremely stable and I have yet to see it go down during times with heavy load (see the FIRST API last season). In addition, the FRC Events API has some interesting requirements about handling keys such that each user has to have their own token and username (at least that is how I am reading it). In short, TBA's API has basically the same data, but makes it much easier to handle and access.

[plnyyanks]

Oh, one more thing I forgot.

TBA also serves data for some offseason events. If you want to test your project at an offseason this summer, ask the event coordinators to get in touch with TBA, and we can show them how to enable live match data.

[ProgBot]

Ok, cool. Thanks for the info all. Can you think of any reason why going directly to FIRST's API would be wanted, aside from it being the original source?

[scottgoering]

Originally Posted by ProgBot

Ok, cool. Thanks for the info all. Can you think of any reason why going directly to FIRST's API would be wanted, aside from it being the original source?

Think long term... If FIRST is still around, they will likely have an API available. TBA could technically shut down tomorrow.

[Eugene Fang]

Originally Posted by scottgoering

Think long term... If FIRST is still around, they will likely have an API available. TBA could technically shut down tomorrow.

While true, all our data is public and code is open source, so theoretically someone could get another version of TBA running up quite quickly.

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by scottgoering

Think long term... If FIRST is still around, they will likely have an API available. TBA could technically shut down tomorrow.

Originally Posted by Eugene Fang

While true, all our data is public and code is open source, so theoretically someone could get another version of TBA running up quite quickly.

Eugene, if you try and pull and funny stuff, I think http://tba.lopreiato.me/ is going to be the next big thing