Wanting to expand my programming horizons I recently started building a website.
I have started to build up my website and it is heavily focused around an external api.
The reason for using this api is that I could not get all the information it provides by huge huge margin.
I am making a video games site where users can comment on games so I want to be able for users to find all there favourite games on the site to talk about, now as well as just titles it contains so much great information about a game, websites, developers, released dates, screenshots, reviews, trailers,.... the list goes on. I could never ever bring this much information together.
It is built by a community of hundreds if not thousands of people contributing to the information.
Now you understand that this api is crucial to my site.
As this is an experimental site for my education only it doesn't matter really matter but I did wonder if it is "good practise"/"smart" to do things like this.
The reason I am thinking this is that if the owners of the site decide to kill the api or not allow it to be updated then my site would become worthless! even the owners could change the licensing on how it can be used etc.
Of course when it is purely for my own experience it wouldn't be a major deal but what about if you spent a lot of time on your site and you had a lot of users.
It seems to me like this might be a recipe for disaster to have your website based around something that is out of your control, on the other hand it seems like there are some fantastic api's out there that you could not source the information they provide even if you wanted to so why not take full advantage?