Test doubles for services is a real problem. I am glad this exists.
That said: Conflating together mocks, fakes and stubs does not convey the authority necessary to show that you can help developers work better. It conveys that you don’t really know what you are doing. The blog post mentions fakes, which isn’t what this service offers. The docs themselves indicate to me that what are really being offered are stubs.
I would be really worried about investing time in this service when its not clear what I am being offered, and its not clear that the developers really understand what they are offering me either.
EDIT: Also, $50 a month for such a service sounds pretty high. I’m not usually one for “but I can spin up my own [x] on [y]” as it usually comes with the caveat of “but I didn’t do any of the number crunching about how to maintain this”, but you could build something pretty quickly to deploy on Heroku or App Engine and get the same result.
Hi! Blog post author here. I appreciate the feedback that conflating mocks/fakes/stubs might make it less clear to some potential users what exactly the service is offering. Overall, I am less interested in using precisely Martin Fowler’s definitions of these overloaded terms than conveying in practical terms to the target audience what the service does, but I may revisit the language. The service presently offers “mock servers”, not “fakes”.
EDIT: the accepted answer for your linked stackoverflow post says “in fact, it doesn’t really matter what you call it” ;)
This is not my only engagement with the site, and in any case I think this is a neat project despite there being a way to pay for it. But noted! I didn’t mean for it to seem like a commercial.
Test doubles for services is a real problem. I am glad this exists.
That said: Conflating together mocks, fakes and stubs does not convey the authority necessary to show that you can help developers work better. It conveys that you don’t really know what you are doing. The blog post mentions fakes, which isn’t what this service offers. The docs themselves indicate to me that what are really being offered are stubs.
I would be really worried about investing time in this service when its not clear what I am being offered, and its not clear that the developers really understand what they are offering me either.
For background, this is a good rundown between fakes, mocks and stubs: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/346372/whats-the-difference-between-faking-mocking-and-stubbing
EDIT: Also, $50 a month for such a service sounds pretty high. I’m not usually one for “but I can spin up my own [x] on [y]” as it usually comes with the caveat of “but I didn’t do any of the number crunching about how to maintain this”, but you could build something pretty quickly to deploy on Heroku or App Engine and get the same result.
Hi! Blog post author here. I appreciate the feedback that conflating mocks/fakes/stubs might make it less clear to some potential users what exactly the service is offering. Overall, I am less interested in using precisely Martin Fowler’s definitions of these overloaded terms than conveying in practical terms to the target audience what the service does, but I may revisit the language. The service presently offers “mock servers”, not “fakes”.
EDIT: the accepted answer for your linked stackoverflow post says “in fact, it doesn’t really matter what you call it” ;)
We tend to look down on posting commercial projects here, especially if it’s your only engagement with the site.
This sounds somewhat similar to pact.io (foss, self-hosted).
This is not my only engagement with the site, and in any case I think this is a neat project despite there being a way to pay for it. But noted! I didn’t mean for it to seem like a commercial.