BBC's Christmas deprecations Dated the 24/12/2015 the BBC's Nitro API dropped some interesting deprecations

Just after New Year, my periodic polling of the BBC’s Nitro API endpoint revealed a change in the api.xml, api.json and nitro-schema.xsd files.

Well, a simple ‘git status’ revealed it.

Despite containing deprecations dated November and December, the revised API wasn’t published until early January. The BBC work to a two-week release cycle.

The most interesting change is that the BBC have deprecated entire hosts and replaced them with a new one.

Out go nitro.api.bbci.co.uk, data.bbc.co.uk, d.bbc.co.uk, and in comes programmes.api.bbc.com. The new host is up and running, presumably as of the deprecation date of 24/12/2015, but there is no word yet on when the old hosts will go dark. It will be interesting to see if Nitro consumers will react to this in-band communication of a breaking change (the API spec doesn’t otherwise specify the host in any way) or whether the BBC will have updated their commercial partners via other means.

Other changes

The Programmes mixin versions_availability (in my JS API this is mProgrammesVersionsAvailability) has been deprecated, apparently since 10/11/2015. It may be the BBC simply forgot to change the release-status originally. It has been replaced by available_versions (mProgrammesAvailableVersions) which has a different response format, as documented in the nitro-schema.xsd

Updated API files

The api.js and swagger.json have been regenerated. The swagger.json is still showing as failing validation in Swagger.UI, but this is due to a typo in the swagger parser which has now been corrected; I’m just waiting for the next version to be released.