Idea feedback - API Mocker
STORY:
I am building a SAAS product for a client to be used as an internal application. This has a lot of analytics and graphs and tables that needs to be shown on various pages. Instead of showing it as a design, which is pretty much a static prototype which changes on click and displays different pages, I thought to create HTML pages which render dummy data fetched from online portals. This increased the feel when the customer used the app and he was delighted.
IDEA:
The idea is to create a portal for developers to design their API call request resources with dynamic property names and types, that could create random generated data and expose it as an API.
So all the dev has to do is point to the API and structure the data that you want from the API in the app. This can also be shared with multiple people in team so you have a single source of all the request/response models.
FEATURES:
1 User and Team management
2 Resources creation and sharing with team
3 Creating custom APIs for each resource (GET, POST etc with parameters)
ROADMAP:
1 Create typescript models from the response to directly import in JS projects
2 Create scripts for no-sql database to create the collections
There are few other tools available for this purpose but I am trying to get it in the right track for developers and teams to collaborate with good UX.
Please let me know your feedback.
I think it's a good idea.
I'm a techie though and it took me a little while to fully understand, I think you could use someone to write simpler, less technical copy.
I would call it something like an API simulator and make the UI dead simple - literally press a few buttons, add some labels and have the endpoint ready to go immediately.
I'm not sure if the need for this is strong enough that people would pay, but it would definitely be useful.
Thanks a lot. You are right, maybe a simpler copy should be better. Also my motive was to facilitate the FE devs to just start working fast on prototypes with actual data model they expect.
Plus I am trying to have it as free, just as giving it back to the developer community.
If your intention is a free tool, then yeah, I think it would be quite handy and well received.
I can think of some other peripheral ideas, like actually getting the tool to generate API Docs, or specs that could be easily downloaded and handed to a developer to develop on. So not just simulating dummy data, but prototyping.
Exactly. My whole intention is to use this product as a single source of truth for UI team to see the types of data they are getting from API and for the API team to see this as reference and then create their API models.
I have also thought about to create SQL like structure if possible so using this we can try and create a database script as well. And to also create TS models so we can have strongly typed models in UI. So this becomes a collaboration tool and reference document that everyone will have access to.
PS: You are right, my text is very technical :| Not sure how to get out of this. Will try