Project Idea: Fake Server

While working on the Presence assignments for the Stanford iPhoneU course I noticed that they did something really interesting to make interacting with the Twitter API a little bit easier. They setup a server that responded to actions similar to Twitter with some sample data. This really helped out so that when messing around during development so that Twitter wasn’t annoyed with all the requests.

While working with this dummy server they set up I got thinking that something like this might be useful when developing other API mashups. I don’t think Stanford wants to set something like this up for all the apis out there though, so what about a Gem that does something like this?

What I’m thinking of is a very simple gem that basically runs a Sinatra app which mimics a Twitter or Google Maps or some other api. These ‘mock apis’ could be plugins that could easily be pulled into the gem and run locally. I could see running commands like ‘fakeserver install Twitter git://github.com/jduff/fake-twitter.git’ and this would install a git clone so that it can be kept up to date. Then you could run the fake server with ‘fakeserver Twitter’ and then you’d have a local server that mocked Twitters API.

I did a little bit of searching and still haven’t really come across anything that does what I am thinking. There is this project, mock-server that is kind of like FakeWeb but you define the mocks by writing actions like you do with Sinatra. This is kind of what I’m thinking of except it doesn’t run a server, but the general idea is pretty much the same.

I’m not sure if there is another project that does what I am thinking of but I might start working on something like this. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions leave a comment and let me know.