What is the point of the SpaceAPI component?

Feature Requests
1

I have successfully integrated the SpaceAPI component into my HA installation.

I had to create a binary rest-sensor:

binary_sensor:
  - platform: rest
    name: "Front Door"
    resource: "http://IP_ADDRESS/ENDPOINT"
    value_template: '{{ value_json["state"]["open"] }}'

Which, in turn, had to be added to the SpaceAPI component configuration:

spaceapi:
  space: "HACKERSPACE_NAME"
  logo: "URL_FOR_LOGO"
  url: "URL"
  location:
    address: "ADDRESS"
  contact:
    email: "EMAIL_ADDRESS"
  issue_report_channels:
    - email
  state:
    entity_id: binary_sensor.front_door

All this information can be extracted from the Hackerspaces’ JSON endpoint, e.g. https://status.stratum0.org/status.json and yields this JSON response:

{
  "version": "0.1",
  "isOpen": true,
  "since": "2018-06-12T10:55:19.124826",
  "openedBy": "Drahflow",
  
  "api": "0.13",
  "space": "Stratum 0",
  "url": "https://stratum0.org",
  "logo": "https://stratum0.org/mediawiki/images/thumb/c/c6/Sanduhr-twitter-avatar-black.svg/240px-Sanduhr-twitter-avatar-black.svg.png",
  "location": {
    "address": "Hamburger Strasse 273a, Haus A2, 38114 Braunschweig, Germany",
    "lon": 10.5211247,
    "lat": 52.2785658
  },
  "contact": {
    "phone": "+49 531 287 69 245",
    "twitter": "@stratum0",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "ml": "[email protected]",
    "issue_mail": "cm9oaWViK3NwYWNlYXBpLWlzc3Vlc0Byb2hpZWIubmFtZQ==",
    "irc": "irc://chat.freenode.net/#stratum0",
    "foursquare": "4f243fd0e4b0b653a35e3ae4"
  },
  "issue_report_channels": [
    "issue_mail"
  ],
  "state": {
    "ext_since": 1528793719,
    "lastchange": 1528793719,
    "open": true,
    "icon": {
      "open": "http://status.stratum0.org/open_square.png",
      "closed": "http://status.stratum0.org/closed_square.png"
    },
    "trigger_person": "Drahflow",
    "lastchange": 1528793719
  },
  "feeds": {
    "blog": {
      "type": "atom",
      "url": "https://stratum0.org/blog/atom.xml"
    },
    "wiki": {
      "type": "atom",
      "url": "https://stratum0.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Spezial:Letzte_%C3%84nderungen&feed=atom"
    },
    "calendar": {
      "type": "ical",
      "url": "https://stratum0.org/calendar/events.ics"
    }
  }
}

I think it would be much more prudent to have a user only specify this endpoint url and the component creates things like (binary) sensors and maybe a card. I was thinking like this:

spaceapi:
  endpoint: "https://status.stratum0.org/status.json"

Don’t you agree? Otherwise, what is the purpose of having a SpaceAPI component? Am I missing something obvious?

2

For others finding this, I am sure OPs issue is solved after 6 years… or maybe it isn’t… anyways:

The spaceapi integration is for hackerspaces that want to expose their information via HA, not for members fetching that information.

The integrations website also says that (but I also did read over it):

The spaceapi integration allow Hackerspaces to expose information to web apps […]

(see: here).

For fetching that information, rest works fine.