How to Build a Live Sports Scoreboard Using Vanilla JS and WebSockets

A developer tutorial published on DEV Community walks through building a real-time sports scoreboard using the Orbistats API, plain JavaScript, and WebSockets — no frontend framework required. The guide covers fetching today's fixtures via a REST endpoint, rendering match cards with live score displays, and opening a persistent WebSocket connection for real-time score updates. A key focus is handling socket disconnections gracefully, with an automatic three-second retry loop to prevent scoreboards from silently going stale. The project uses Orbistats' free-tier API key, which allows up to 150 requests per day across all endpoints with no credit card needed, and a public sandbox is available for testing without signup. The finished component is designed as a drop-in module that can later be adapted into React or Vue applications.
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