The REST Web Service

Base URL

All of the URLs in the documentation have the following base:

https://api-summary.soccermetrics.net/v0/

The Marcotti-Summary API is served exclusively over HTTPS.

Warning

Any request to the API made over HTTP will now return a 403 SSL REQUIRED error.

A Quick Word about REST

REST is a popular buzzword in the web development world, and not everyone is aware of what is means and why it’s become so important. Let’s explain it now.

REST is short for REpresentational State Transfer. It is a software architectural design for distributed systems such as the World Wide Web and was first coined by Dr Roy Fielding (one of the main authors of the HTTP protocol) in his Ph.D. dissertation in 2000. It’s become popular in web API design because it allows data to be consumed in the same way that data are exchanged on the Internet. We’ve taken care to design our APIs using REST principles in order to take advantage of the Web’s natural and scalable architecture.

A RESTful web service follows a few key design principles:

  • Application state and functionality are abstracted into resources
  • Every resource is uniquely addressed though a universal syntax for use in hypermedia links
  • All resources transfer state between client and server through a universal interface with the following characteristics:
    • A constrained set of well-defined operations (on the Web, HTTP verbs)
    • A constrained set of content-types, with the option of “code-on-demand” support

The result is a web service protocol that is client-server, stateless, cacheable, and layered. These features allow for separation of duties between client and server, increasing scalability of servers and facilitating the use of middleware like firewalls, proxies, and gateways without affecting the web service interface.

Here are some resources if you want to learn more: