Why Maque?

Are you spending hours on every project, creating sample XML or JSON files? How many times on a given project are you asking your server team to hurry up and finish an API so that you can start working? Are you tired to polluting your application code with mocking frameworks?

Maque is a cross-platform, desktop-based, development tool that is designed to help developers create, test and maintain web-enabled applications in a variety of spaces; such as mobile, web and desktop. With a built-in HTTP Server developers can create mock data services to develop and test their applications against. Maque also provides the ability to create and then dynamically modify JSON, HTML and XML documents in an easy to use UI.

Take A Look Inside

Interested in learning more about Maque. Take a look at two of our brief introductory videos. Don't worry, the videos are only a few minutes each. Your API won't be ready by then anyways. Sit back and enjoy.

Maque Makes It Faster

• Data Services Does your application interact with data servers via the web? Maque provides the ability to quickly create standard HTTP 1.1 RESTful web services for development and testing. Create an unlimited number of rules to test every scenario you can think of: from the most common requests to the craziest edge case.
• Data Templates Do you need to have XML, JSON or HTML data to drive your application? You can easily create complex XML, HTML and JSON templates that allow you to generate hundreds of different versions and use cases with the press of a button.
• Placeholder Images Need the images to layout your application, but your designer is still working on them? Maque provides the ability to generate as many placeholder images in multiple sizes as you need. That way you can see exactly how the app will layout before you get the final assets.
• Lorem Ipsum How does your app look with 20 paragraphs of text or thirty bulleted items? Using the lorem ipsum generator you can create an assortment of placeholder text. Maque's Lorem Ipsum generator is fully integrated into Data Templates, so that you can create as complex of set of configurations from basic paragraphs to nested UI layouts.

Data Services

Are you building a web application that requires server communication? Do you use a mocking framework? Maque solves all your mocking needs and is technology agnostic. Are you building a Javascript application that connects to Twitter? How about an iOS game that connects to a custom game server? Maque is the product to help you develop and test you web connected apps.

As web developers, we know how frustrating it is when you are waiting for a server layer (API) to be developed. We have two choices, sit back and make paper airplanes or we can be proactive and fake the server! The latter is what most developer do, because we can't afford to wait around and watch time, budget and trust of our clients fade away. Usually we create one off solutions or maybe we use a mocking framework to provide us the data we need to build our user interfaces.

The problem is, the solutions out there often give you a narrow view of the world or require a lot of extra code that will, and should, never see the light of day. When you use these solutions you usually develop against one scenario. And that's usually a good scenario, not all the error cases such as when the server is down or overloaded. If we want to test more advanced use cases, we have to manually reconfigure out development environment to return different data. Data we usually code by hand. And when it comes to testing a server being overloaded. Well, good luck!

To help build web-enabled application, Maque is providing the ability to create HTTP driven services that you can use for development and testing purposes. Maque allows you to create an end-point and then create rules for the most common HTTP method types: GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. Think of rules as use cases, they check the arguments provided to the URL and then make a decision on how to respond. You can create rules that return a 200 OK with an image, JSON or XML response. Heck, have it return a JavaScript file. Create a rule that returns a 500 Internal Server Error when a bad argument value is passed. Maque lets you develop applications that are ready for every real-word scenarios, good or bad.

Feature Breakdown

• Built in HTTP 1.1 Server
• Create an assortment of URL services to test different features
• Provides support the most common HTTP method types: GET, PUT, POST, DELETE
• Create rules to test valid requests, errors or redirects
• Create simulations of RESTful based applications to test against
• Quickly set and change the port the server runs on
• Put the service or method into error mode at any time
• Add delays to the response to test sever slowdowns
• Built in file server that can host almost any file type (JavaScript, Images, CSS, HTML)
• Define HTTP response values from the standard 200s, 300, 400s and 500s sets
• Support for JSOP formatted calls
• RegEx Support for matching argument values and names
• Define multiple results to develop and test polling based calls

Data Templates

You are heads down in development and your application needs JSON, HTML or XML data. This could be data that is provided by servers, defines configurations or you need to start slamming out CSS for the site's layout. The only problem is the content isn't live yet (heck, the service side app hasn't even been started yet!) or even worse, you need to test how your app handles multiple data structures but you can't convince the cloud to produce it at your whim.

Typically, we solve this by firing up a text editor of choice and whipping up a bunch of JSON, XML or HTML by hand. Its not too bad for simpler stuff or a small set of files, but what happens when the data format is super complex and you need tons of variations to handle it all? We have worked on projects that had a team of people whose sole job was to create XML documents, by hand, for testing. *shudder*

With Maque, we want to put an end to that horrible and mind-numbing process. Maque provide the ability to quickly create a set of data templates that define the simplest JSON to the most complex XML & HTML data structures out there. The goal of the template is to provide the structure of the data, then you can go in and define how the template can randomize and modify the output on the fly.

Feature Breakdown

• Create wellformed XML, HTML and JSON files without writing a line of code
• Import existing XML & JSON documents to create new templates
• XML templates support fully qualified namespaces
• Create XML nodes, attributes and values
• Create JSON objects, arrays and values
• Standard HTML doc types are provided (HTML, XHTML, HTML5, etc.)
• Increment and Randomize any value
• Integrate Lorem Ipsum generation into your content
• Define common or custom date formats which are populated into your content
• Quickly define how many children instances or properties are created for each document
• View the XML, JSON or HTML output in realtime as you build the templates
• XML and HTML templates support fully qualified namespaces
• Insert incrementing & random counts using a variable syntax
• Save and share the templates with your team and other developers
• Define sets of data to populate your content
• Import basic CSV files to generate sets
• Create default sets that are used for any new template

Placeholder Images (FPO)

If you are working on a project that requires a lot of images, mocking them up can take a lot of time. When developing a photo gallery, blog, or even some new social media tool, images play an important role. When doing layout, we often don't have the final assets yet so we need some kind of image for placement only (FPO).

Usually, this means we have to jump into Photoshop or Gimp or some other design tool to whip out a few images. Even for an expert in the tools, it can take a bit of time to bang out 30 FPOs just so we can test it out. It's worse if you don't spend a lot of time in the tools, or don't even have one installed (MS Paint doesn't count...).

Maque makes creating FPO images really, really easy. Set a size, choose a background image or color, define the labels and other basic properties and then tell Maque how many JPEGs or PNGs do you need. 10, 20, 100... no problem. Maque will increment the names of each image, increment the text for each image (so you can tell them apart). With these images in hand you can now create a FaceTweet or MyBook of your own that will handle any kind of graphical content that is thrown at it.

Feature Breakdown

• Create hundreds PNG and JPEG images with a push of a button
• File names are incremented to provide a unique name for each image
• Images can have customized incremented labels to make them easily identifiable
• Customize the image border, background and label style
• Import existing images as the background to customize the look for your application
• Create gradient backgrounds or use the classic placeholder box style
• Save your FPO configuration for reuse or to share with your team

Lorem Ipsum

There always comes a time in a project where we need placeholder text. It could be to fill out a design or to test how the UI scales with variable data. Our focus with Maque is to make your life as simple as possible when it comes to mocking all kinds of data and this includes textual content.

To help you create mock text, Maque provides a Lorem Ipsum text generator that supports generating text by characters, paragraphs or words. Open the Lorem Ipsum window to create simple text, or create a super complex ordered list in Data Templates and let Lorem Ipsum fill it in. Create ranges of text sizes, so that you aren't seeing the same values for every element. Mix and match to create the flexibility you need.

Spend less time cutting and pasting the same block of text over and over and move on with what's important, getting your project done.

Feature List

• Generate Lorem Ipsum structured text by the character, word or paragraph
• Wrap the text in HTML, JSON or XML-based formats using Data Templates
• Snapshot the configuration and save it to disk
• Share snapshots and import configurations to keep your generation consistent