Are you dumb? Steam has a new API!

Table of Contents

• XML vs JSON API comparison
  • The pros of using the old XML API
  • The cons of using the old XML API
• Overcoming the slow updates issue
  • How can it help?

The main reasons why I have considered using the old API and how that can be a good thing (or not).

XML vs JSON API comparison

Let's take a peak at the points, shall we?

The pros of using the old XML API

• It supports some community options that are not available on the new API (e.g. getSummary, ...).
• It's about 5 times faster than the new API.
• It does not require an API Key!

The cons of using the old XML API

• It may be a litle slower to update (yet to be checked).
• It's deprecated.
• It's XML (hehehe).

Overcoming the slow updates issue

A scraper API, made with the help of xPath, may overcome this serious problem that both APIs suffer from.

How can it help?

As noted before, both APIS have a not so small delay until some information is updated.
For example, the player's summary can take up to several hours to be updated on the XML API, and the online status also takes a few minutes to be updated on the JSON API. There is, however, a third way to acquire profile information, that is not subject to these delays. It's scraping, all right. It is, however, much more volatile, and requires much more maintenance. Thus, I write bellow:

Todo:

Implement a Scraper for the most important and volatile stats.