The use of API caching by adept Mobile to support apps for major professional sporting leagues
For partners including the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, CHL, and many more, Adept Mobile, a major developer of mobile apps in the sports and entertainment industry, implements multi-platform mobile experiences. Every application receives a tonne of traffic during game days and times, and the Adept Mobile team is in charge of providing consistently fast user interfaces.
Adept Mobile first contacted Section several years ago after growing dissatisfied with traditional CDN solutions that could not provide the degree of flexibility and control that their apps required. The Adept team continues to grow its solution set alongside the Section platform, designing unique edge solutions to improve in-app experiences after early achievements with Section regarding performance and development workflow improvements.
The Difficulties
Each Adept app consumes enormous quantities of the league, team, and athlete data to provide users with engaging content experiences. The San Jose Sharks, as an illustration, provide fans with rich, dynamic in-app experiences that include unique content, live game streaming, game day notifications, secure digital ticketing, and stadium tours. For clubs in the league and other significant professional sports leagues, Adept Mobile offers comparable app experiences.
The Adept team recently contacted Section’s developers to discuss problems with data gathering from multiple API endpoints. It should come as no surprise that the configuration of each API from the NFL, CHL, NHL, etc., varies slightly, and some have rate constraints that call for workarounds.
Adept Mobile’s platform utilises a React front-end. How to standardise data coming in from the APIs on the client side before it enters the React app is a major problem that the Adept team is working to tackle.
Correct response
The React app can be standardised to fetch for a single endpoint independent of the sports league, thanks to the reverse proxy caching and routing layers that the Section team helped Adept Mobile install in front of each API endpoint.
They may reduce the stress on the league’s APIs and get around rate constraints by using the front-end SDK, which retrieves from the designated endpoint and renders the React view layer.
Next Steps
The API caching layer from Section has been essential in reducing API demand, but what’s next could be more intriguing. Some client-side code currently manages data normalisation in the Adept application. Adept is actively collaborating with the Section platform to construct tables dynamically, free from the need to worry about the format of receiving API data. Adept is using Section’s Node JS module at the edge to conduct the normalisation to achieve this.
The nice thing is that the JavaScript code used by the Adept application to normalise data on the client side is already there. This implies that the Adept team may start operating at the edge immediately by simply copying the current application code into the Section Node JS module.
