LinkedIn, the social network for professionals that is now owned by Microsoft, is making one of the tools that it has developed in-house for its own work..
LinkedIn , the social network for professionals that is now owned by Microsoft , is making one of the tools that it has developed in-house for its own work open for use by others. The company today announced that it would be open sourcing Flashback , a tool for mocking internet traffic for developer tests, under a BSD two-clause license.
In a blog post, LinkedIn said that it had been using Flashback to test things like reliability, scalability, and speed on new code before deploying it more widely. You can see an example of how it works here.
Flashback was based on Betamax — not the old video standard, but a another tool developed to mock actions of web services and REST APIs in developer tests by “intercepting HTTP connections initiated by a web application, and then later replaying them.” (‘Betamax’ because it was inspired by another tool, the VCR library for Ruby.)
The key difference, write creators and LinkedIn engineers Shangshang Feng , Yabin Kang , and Dan Vinegrad in a blog post , is that Flashback can work in an isolated environment, whereas Betamax, like other proxies, requires internet connectivity to work.
