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Faker.js - generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and Node.js

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Re: Faker.js - generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and Node.js

#11

Post by qwerty69 »

SammoJ wrote: post #8
qwerty69 wrote: post #6

Very nice library. It would be nice to add the ability to generate random values based on a distribution, e.g. the values are random but correspond to a normal distribution with a given mean and standard deviation. This would be very useful for testing statistical libraries and applications.

Which attributes would you sample from a normal distribution here? I don't see any numerical attributes where this would make sense. One could add weight, height, age etc. and sample from the relevant geographical/gender distributions?

An example would be the processing of automatically acquired measurement data. Such data usually shows some kind of distribution (binominal, normal, geometric, etc...) that needs to be taken into account when validating such a tool.

Re: Faker.js - generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and Node.js

#13

Post by paavo »

DanBC wrote: post #7

This is cool. I'm gently disturbed that it generates valid email addresses. You pick a random name, follow it with an @, then add a random word, and then add a TLD. Obviously you're not responsible for how people use the tool. Best practice would be to use the domain example.com

In most use cases I can think of the generated data is used only in a closed (testing) environment and won't be visible to web crawlers and spambots. Many developers like me use these libraries for prototyping different UI views for their apps.

Unfortunately, spammers do have way more advanced technologies to try and guess working addresses. Libraries like this generate mostly very improbable addresses: you would get way better results just by taking lists of most popular first names and family names and concatenating them with some well-known web mail providers.

Re: Faker.js - generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and Node.js

#14

Post by paavo »

revorad wrote: post #5

This is fantastic. I was actually looking for something like this to test some APIs with dummy data.

The original such library was Perl's Data::Faker which was ported to Ruby as Faker gem (and later refactored to faster and more comprehensive Ffaker gem).

Re: Faker.js - generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and Node.js

#15

Post by agotterer »

schumacher wrote: post #4

Cool. I recently build a similar thing for Magento to provide demo data and for anonymization purposes. Some parts of faker.js needs sure refactorings ...

I've been looking for something that can generate fake cart data. Is what you built open source?

Re: Faker.js - generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and Node.js

#17

Post by fruchtose »

Great project! I would, however, recommend an API with more namespaces. Functions like Address.ukCounty don't sit well with me; such an API would be a mess if you added support for countries other than the US and the UK. You could (and probably create namespaces for each country code, e.g.:

    Address
    |-> US
        |-> state
    |-> UK
        |-> state
An alternative would be for country-specific generators to take a country code as an argument. I am not an experienced API designer, though, so take my comments with a heaping of salt.
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