Fake Subway APIs

http://fakesubwayapis.appspot.com/

This is just a little thing, a small piece of plumbing, to facilitate next month's Thing (with the Stuff) and it's pretty much what it sounds like. It doesn't even do much right except return the name of a subway, or train, station for a short code.

Like this:

# GET http://fakesubwayapis.appspot.com/bart/getinfo/24th

<rsp stat="ok">
	<station code="24th" service="bart">
		<url>http://www.bart.gov/stations/24th/</url>
		<name>24th St. Mission (SF)</name>
	</station>
</rsp>

So far there are only four supported lines: the BART in San Francisco, the STM in Montreal, the Underground in London and the National Rail Service in the whole of the UK. The reasons why are two-fold: They have unique short code for each station and they have corresponding web pages for each one of those identifiers.

At the two extremes of getting it are BART with lovely, detailed Places-style pages for each of the stop in their network and Transport For London which requires a handful of work-arounds, and shims, to account for the fact that there are only arrival and departures pages for station-plus-line combinations.

What they all share though is a lack of an API so, over the weekend, I banged out an AppEngine thingy that simply wraps a bunch of static lists in plain-vanilla XML-over-HTTP glue. I have two hopes for Fake Subway APIs: 1) That they be replaced by real-live APIs operated by their respective transit services 2) That, in the meantime, people submit patches and data (geo information, for example) and help to shape the kinds of properly maintained APIs that we can hope to use in the future.

As usual, the source code is available for poking on the GitHub: http://github.com/straup/gae-fakesubwayapis