nba-client-template

nba.com API endpoints encoded as JSON for easy client library development.

notice

It appears that nba.com is in the process of slowly retiring the stats.nba.com/stats endpoints in favor of a new data.nba.com/data API. I plan to add those endpoints to this project at some point.

info

This repo holds a JSON file that can be used to programmatically generate a client for the NBA's stats API. Since it's JSON, it should be trivially parseable by any language. It's currently published as an NPM module, but if you want it packaged up for your language of choice as well, please open an issue or better yet, a pull request. Thanks!

The file contains two primary parts: endpoints and parameters. Endpoints should generally be mapped to methods on an API client. Each endpoint has a list of parameters that it accepts. Parameter objects hold some data about individual parameters -- specifically, what the parameter is called (name), its known values (values), its default value (default), and a boolean (enumerated) indicating whether its listed values encompass all valid values. These can be used to implement parameter validation.

The simplest and probably easiest implementation is to map each endpoint to a function accepting a single argument, that being a hash of {parameter: value}. To provide some examples in code, the examples folder contains three very simple client implementations in Python, Ruby, and Go. The Python and Ruby examples are implemented pretty much the same way, and while they are certainly not idiomatic in the respective languages, they should illustrate the general idea. For languages without highly dynamic reflection features, code generation might be used to create a client. The Go example illustrates how that might work -- using Go to generate a Go file.

A full-featured Node.js client based on this template can be seen at bttmly/nba.