It's not really global, no; you can only get station information for the station you most recently visited at the time you issue the query, and likewise you can only get outfitting details for the ship you're currently piloting (you used to get outfitting details for all your ships everywhere, but that disappeared in 2.3 and I don't think they're going to bring it back). So the data you get from the CAPI is still limited to your commander's current ship or station, and in that way it's very much like the journal which can tell you, for example, the physical properties of a planet you just scanned -- those properties are no more "related to yourself" than a station's commodity price list, I'd say.



So the main difference is the access method and the types of data available, which are related in a way. The journal runs all the time and spits out data when you do things in-game, and various tools can pick that data up and do things with it, but they cannot request specific data on your behalf -- you have to perform the requisite action in-game to generate the data you want, and that works fine for certain kinds of data. The CAPI by comparison gives a snapshot of some larger chunks of data (as mentioned, mostly station and ship details), but it's a passive resource that a tool can query when it wants to rather than having that stuff be spit out automatically all the time, and that's a more convenient model for that kind of data.



It's probably also worth noting that this difference in usage was not really the result of a conscious design choice on FD's behalf; the CAPI was not actually intended for us to use in the first place, FD created that only to enable their own mobile app, and folks in the community just figured out how it worked and (eventually) got FD's blessing to also use it. That mobile app is long since discontinued and abandoned, but since we'd been using its API, FD has left that component running.



The journal, on the other hand, was specifically designed and built for our use. In fact I suspect that FD was intending for it to be a replacement for the CAPI so they could finally shut that service down, but unfortunately because of these differences in use-cases, the journal is not (yet) really a suitable replacement for the CAPI, so FD has (I think somewhat begrudgingly) continued to offer both features.



I think we'd all love to see the CAPI replaced with a more robust solution (ideally something that allows for authentication without requiring the player's actual account password), but FD is not currently able to allocate any development time to that, so these little patches to the existing CAPI are the interim solution.