Show HN: QEDServer: A standalone playground for JS and AJAX | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: QEDServer: A standalone playground for JS and AJAX

qedserver.napcs.com

22 pointsbphogan3 comments

Cool, thanks!

Sorry to get off-topic, but this really spurred me to think of something somewhat similar that would be very useful to me personally: a generic "mock" server. A static call-responder, if you will.

Rather than already having an API like this one does, it'd be one where a browser-side developer could specify on the server a list of static call/return pairs in a form similar to:

for web service call c with parameters p[0] = 'abc', p[1] = 123, and any value for p[2], return string 'some JSON string'".

That way one could easily have front-end folks working on browser-side code, making real web service calls and getting back real-looking results that are appropriate for this app. Later, as the real back-end progresses, the front-end can be repointed toward it.

This would need to be setup-free enough that most front-end folks wouldn't have any trouble creating/maintaining sets of these. Perhaps best would be for it to be a public service so that the devs wouldn't even have to run their own server.

Anybody know if anything like this exists?

Hey. That was suggested to me by a good friend when I showed this to him. QEDServer's code is on Github... it's just a Sinatra app wrapped by jRuby. I could see a situation where we just have a config file and we just say "this route returns this string" or something. It wouldn't need to be anything fancy at all and probably wouldn't take terribly long to build.

I wanted QEDServer to be zero-install, zero-setup because I do a lot of teaching with jQuery, etc. But this makes two people, plus me, who thinks that would be neat.

Thanks for the feedback!

You can do what you are looking for with AppJet.jar. It has a built-in RESTful dispatcher. In your example you would write a JavaScript function like:

    function get_c() {
      if (request.params.p == '0') 
        print 'abc';

      if (request.params.p == '1') 
        print '123';

      if (request.params.p == '0') 
        print ...;

You can also respond to POST, PUT and DELETE request with put_c(), delete_c() and so on.

It is a setup-free server in a jar with a persistent object store and many more tools. https://github.com/dvbportal/appjet

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