Question for the programmers here

[xfire]

I have been learning about web development for a while now, and want to continue practicing my skills by creating an mma/ufc related web app. I was wondering if anyone knew of any free web API's (preferrably in JSON format) that contain data about MMA or the UFC (like statistics, event results, fighter records, etc.) So far I haven't been able to find any. Fightmetrics has an api, but looks like it costs money. I searched on programmable web as well, but didn't find any there as well. I guess web scraping is an option, but my question on that is would the website take any legal action, even though my web app is going only really going to be used by me my friends, and maybe potential employers?

 

[blopdak]

I have been learning about web development for a while now, and want to continue practicing my skills by creating an mma/ufc related web app. I was wondering if anyone knew of any free web API's (preferrably in JSON format) that contain data about MMA or the UFC (like statistics, event results, fighter records, etc.) So far I haven't been able to find any. Fightmetrics has an api, but looks like it costs money. I searched on programmable web as well, but didn't find any there as well. I guess web scraping is an option, but my question on that is would the website take any legal action, even though my web app is going only really going to be used by me my friends, and maybe potential employers?

I learned from exploring the scraping option in the past that "facts" like records, results, names etc. are protected so you will be ok for the most part. You may run into your ip being banned for too many quick consecutive http requests so I suggest throttling to maybe a few requests per second if this happens. The sites terms of service could also forbid scraping. I've never run into issues however.