covidAPI: A Comprehensive Review of A Vital Open-Source GitHub Project
In an era where data is both a tool and a weapon, it is crucial to gain access to reliable and precise data swiftly, more so, if it concerns a global pandemic like COVID-19. One such data source is the covidAPI - an open-source project hosted on GitHub, created and maintained by Javier Aviles. This high-powered, open-source API is a magnificent tool that provides real-time Coronavirus data on an international level. Practical and highly relevant, covidAPI serves an important role by providing precise information to researchers, organizations, and enthusiasts in their quest to analyze and understand the progress of the pandemic.
Project Overview:
The primary goal of the covidAPI project is to provide a reliable source of COVID-19 data worldwide. Given the scale and severity of COVID-19 globally, this project supplies a real-time source of statistics to whoever needs to analyze, predict, or understand the virus's spread. The target audience includes data scientists, researchers, developers, health care organizations, and anyone interested in COVID-19's statistical data.
Project Features:
covidAPI possesses key features that enable access to vast, updated data related to COVID-19. The API provides real-time detail per country and also, an overall global statistic that includes cases, recoveries, deaths, and ongoing cases. The data is updated several times a day to ensure the most accurate coverage, meeting the project's objectives of providing up-to-date, usable data for analysis or understanding.
Technology Stack:
This project is proudly developed with the NodeJS runtime environment and serverless framework while exploiting the advantages of AWS Lambda functions and API Gateway. The reason behind this choice is their scalability, cost-effectiveness, and faster deployments. Libraries like Axios and Cheerio are used to scrape data from the Worldometers website.
Project Structure and Architecture:
covidAPI adopts a microservices architecture, deriving its advantages like the ability to scale and implement modifications independently in isolated codebases. Each Lambda function is a microservice in itself, interacting with the API Gateway to fetch and display data, making it a good example of a serverless application.
