Faker.js VS json-server

Early this month, the malicious attack on free-to-use libraries, namely color.js and faker.js, created a real uproar in the development community. These tools are used in thousands of projects and their downloading rate from npm is estimated in millions per week. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out to be an inside job. Marak Squires, the creator of these libraries, intentionally committed malicious code to his projects and published updated codebases on GitHub and npm. It is said that this sabotage was caused by unsuccessful attempts of Mr. Squires to monetize his projects. Fortunately, malicious packages were quickly removed and the attacker’s account was suspended. The story sparked a new wave of discussion in the development community on possible steps to make the development and maintenance of open-source projects more sustainable.

For anyone else curious about the allusion to Aaron Swartz, it can be found here and reads (as of posting):

Sorry little boy--- I needed to update my LinkedIn profile, hire a professional to write my resume and photograph me, and work on an open-source project no one will use (or worse- work on something everyone uses)"

So people, I've been reading the news regarding some great packages on GitHub, like the Colors and the Faker. I understand that this isn't related entirely with the linux community, but it is something that we should pay attention.

A developer appears to have purposefully corrupted a pair of open-source libraries on GitHub and software registry npm — “faker.js” and “colors.js” — that thousands of users depend on, rendering any project that contains these libraries useless, as reported by Bleeping Computer.

I mean he also maliciously changed all of the links on a faker.js issue to point to conspiracy theories (which I am pretty sure is against Github's TOS): https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/pull/2

About Four (4) Days Ago, the Author of Fakerjs a popular JavaScript library with more than 2 million weekly Download from NPM Deleted the repository and replaced it with one that only has the modified ReadMe "What really happened with Aaron Swartz?" and no content, and pushed an empty package to npm as the latest version (6.6.6).

JSON Server

Our backend will be little more than a two-way translation layer between the database and the user interface (UI). Later in this post we will identify other responsibilities of a backend but our implementation will be kept simple to demonstrate the fundamental machinery and concepts. It is worth noting the backend comes in two parts, web server and application server. Both json-server and Express are able to facilitate these roles from the same URL. This is very useful for our tutorial because we do not have to configure the server to manage Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). It is quite typical for production systems to separate these server roles for all sorts of good reasons but for now it would just create an additional complication.

JSON-Server creates fake REST API with a minimum amount of configuration, it provides a simple way to create mock RESTful APIs and easily define the required endpoints, allows easy definition of the data schema in a JSON file and can serve as a reference for each figure in the project.

I thought about usingJson Server (hosting the repo with the words on Github to begin with), Googlesheets, or maybe Firestore (i would prefer not to use it ,to avoid extra costs just in case it gets a reasonable amount of users). It isnt a big app so i just want a simple solution for storing the words and fetching them.

There is https://github.com/typicode/json-server that is really useful for that matter

JSON server https://github.com/typicode/json-server