[racbart]

This is nice if considered a programming exercise but it's actually pretty useless for real world use.

This data is static, that is it very rarely changes. The whole dataset is also very tiny. It's just better to store this data in-house and don't provide unnecessary point of potential failure by using an external service.

An idea on how to make it more useful is to provide downloadable data dump in several formats suited for immediate import into various data stores. An extra addition might be modules for popular frameworks providing access to this (local) data in all the ways your web service does.

I'm not trying to diss, just trying to find some value for real world usage. The service is neat otherwise.

[darrhiggs]

>> It's just better to store this data in-house and don't provide unnecessary point of potential failure by using an external service.

Isn't this the point of rfc2616 sec13? I haven't looked, but if there are etags etc then I think a computer is better than a human at looking for new data, no?

[icebraining]

The project where the data comes from actually offers dumps in three different formats: https://github.com/mledoze/countries

[vaeke]

totally get your point. although there are cases when using an external service is actually more convenient. maybe riskier but still convenient. thanks.