While designing a webapp that needs to call a remote API, sometimes the API you actually need to use is too complicated or not even available due to local development access issues (e.g. CORS). It’s times like these you learn to, uh, use something lighter and more accessible.

Sure, there’s plenty of Public APIs you could use for such a purpose, but as a developer I like to take a crack at making my own version of something at least once.

Thus, I created Daaaaave, a simple public API built with PHP.

I have a friend named Dave. He’s a cool guy. He’s a fan of the band I’m in. He also has a nice, short name, which is perfect for a webapp. While the project is an elongated Daaaaave, I’ll just refer to it in its original, non-elongated, form from here on out.

My initial use case with Dave was for a Slack bot on our band’s workspace, so that you could just ask for Dave and he’d respond with something random for fun. However, I found that a more general-purpose API was useful for many other things, so I expanded on it quite a bit.

Some Basic Dave API Stuff

You can send an HTTP request to Dave and he will respond with JSON. If you give him no options, then he’ll ask for more.

curl https://dave.neb.host | json_pp

{
   "body" : null,
   "customType" : "server",
   "error" : true,
   "message" : "Dave says: I think you forgot to ask for something. I know about ?binary, ?dave(s), ?http_code, ?json, ?slack, and ?text. See https://github.com/michaelchadwick/daaaaave for more, man.",
   "status" : "204",
   "statusText" : "OK"
}

Dave’s basic unit of currency is, of course, daves. Given no amount, Dave will respond with a single dave.

curl https://dave.neb.host?daves | json_pp

{
   "body" : [
      "dave"
   ],
   ...
}

If you give Dave a quantity, Dave will respond by adding an extra ‘a’ for each subsequent dave:

curl https://dave.neb.host?daves=5 | json_pp

{
   "body" : [
      "dave",
      "daave",
      "daaave",
      "daaaave",
      "daaaaave",
   ],
   ...
}

Dave will also return more than just Dave’s name. Try ?binary&size=1 for a 1 MB binary file, ?http_code=404 for an HTTP response with a 400 response code, or even ?json&size=5 for a random set of 5 JSON items.

For the Road

The Dave API is for everyone to use in any project that needs a quick remote API check. I’m using it in another project to test out browser caching, and it’s been very helpful.

Dave is also completely open-source, so feel free to download the source and tinker. If you find a bug or have a feature request, be sure to let me know.