Is there a HTTP cache suited for developing against API limited web services?

Question

At some point I'm going to want to run my application against something like the real web service. The web service has an API call limit that I could see hitting. I considered serializing out some JSON files manually, but it seems like this would basically be caching the hard way.

Is there a HTTP cache I could run on my local machine which would aggressively (until I manually reset it) cache requests to a certain site?

Answer 1

You say "cache" but I think you really mean "filter" or "proxy". The first solution that comes to mind is the iptables system which can be used, with -limit and -hitcount rules to drop packets to the webserver after some threshold. I won't even pretend to be competent at iptables configuration.

The second course might be a web proxy like Squid using its delay pool mechanism. Expect a learning curve there as well.

Answer 2

I've built a proxy server that handles development requests and ensures that API calls are hammered in testing. This is how I do it with my ASP.Net MVC proxy:

public ActionResult ProxyRequest(string url, string request)
{
   object cachedRequest = Cache[url];
   if(cachedRequest != null)
   {
      return Content(cachedRequest, "application/json");
   }
   else
   {
      // make the http request here
      Cache[url] = cachedRequest;
      return Content(cachedRequest, "application/json");
   }
}

I'm not on my development box right now so I'm doing this off the top off my head, but the concept is the same. Instead of using Cache[url] = cachedRequest I use a Cache.Insert method but that has a lot of parameters that I couldn't remember. (got lazy and built a wrapper class around it so I don't have to remember it)

This setup proxies all of my JSON requests (using a var isDevelopment = true (|| false)) in my JS code and using the isDevelopment variable know whether or not to proxy the request or hit the server directly.