title: Is completely mocking the back-end logic for the front-end reasonable?
body: <p>My boss asked me to find a way to completely disassociate our front-end application from the back-end in the local environment, currently I'm the sole developer for both our back-end software and the front-end, so using Docker I'm able to mimic a production environment and work on both projects separately, (we don't render on the server side), his idea is to mock literally everything, so in theory you wouldn't need the back-end software to develop the front-end.</p>
  
  <p>Two of the (more reasonable) solutions I've thought of are:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Mocking all of the network requests on the frontend, these functions will
  run instead of network requests.
  the problem with this approach is that it is not persistent, all of the data is randomly generated for every request, and in a system that is so oriented around forms, tables, and lists, I feel that getting the data you're expecting after a form submission is a must.
  and in order to persist data, every request would have to go through some sort of data store (Mobx, Redux, etc...) and even then, if the page refreshes, the data is gone.</li>
  <li>Initiating an express server and DB on top of Docker along with Webpack, and mimicking the production server requests and responses using db seeders, this way the front-end is persistent.
  Obviously, this approach would generate plenty of work, and in order to make sure the express server is correctly mimicking the original back-end software, it too will need unit tests and mock requests.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>While mocking the data is great for unit tests, this doesn't seem like the way of doing front-end with such a small team to me, is there a good approach to achieving this that I cant come up with or find? or is this an exercise in poor decoupling strategies?</p>