BetFair API (in Perl)
Posted by mattc at Dec 27, 06 07:20 PM ... Comments (6)
I've released some code I wrote over the summer in the hope I can find someone with a few hours to help me finish it off. As in, someone who writes better Perl than me.
I've called the project betfairfree and, as the description on Google's subversion hosting says, it's an 'interface to the free version of BetFair's Sports Exchange API', and to liberally quote from BetFair themselves ...
"With the Exchange API, you can communicate directly with the Betfair database in XML format via a SOAP interface. By using the Exchange API, your application can provide a custom interface, functionality and specialized operations not otherwise afforded by the web interface."
The code is in a usable state, but certainly not finished, and suffice to say I don't make my living writing Perl.
The main things on the todo list are a) to get a complete coverage of the free API (probably only implements 60% of it at the moment), b) as always, the code deserves a second pass with some areas needing refactoring, and c) some decent examples of what one might do with it, which will of course be the fun part.
It's not going to get finished in a hurry, by me at least, but I'll try to transfer my own notes in to the various areas of the now-public project wiki, issues etc.
The API is described in SOAP, which I've not used before, but I enjoyed working with strongly typed XML documents, and Matt Sergeant's XML::Xpath module was great for removing the headache from working with the heavily nested nodes and multiple namespaces that seem to come hand in hand with SOAP.
So if you have any interest, do download the project files and drop me a line if you have anything to contribute.