HACKER Q&A
📣 richardzhang

Experience building real-time integrations without official APIs?


I need to integrate with platforms that don’t provide official APIs. Another requirement is that these integrations need to connect in real-time with the other platforms without the delay going over 1 minute.

Does anyone have experience doing this? What were you integrating with, and how did you do it?

  👤 tony-allan Accepted Answer ✓
Could you give some examples of the sources you have in mind?

There is the obvious caution, especially for HTML sources, that your integration may be unstable if the HTML code is periodically updated.

👤 sargstuff
Stick to relevant defined standards/api/abi/protocols common to/available for all the platforms being used.
👤 magicalhippo
Your question is a bit under-specified. Like for a web app, no official API might mean it has an "internal" API between frontend and backend.

So yeah, what kind of platforms? And what exactly do you mean by no official API?

For example, we've scraped an interactive web site, where we had to use Selenium to simulate a user in order to fill out search boxes to extract all the data.

Is that the kind of stuff you had in mind?