An Web Application providing the world with ASCII Cats.

I wanted to play around with AWS, Elastic Beanstalk, and deploying web applications to The Cloud. Sure, I could do the typical 'hello world' example... but I wanted something different.

So, fine then. Here's a flask web application that responds to requests with an ascii cat, picked at random from a list. The app is deployed using elastic beanstalk, which sets up an auto-scaling, fault-tolerant, cloud-based, 21st century application environment using all the latest in metrics, notification, and all those bells and whistles. All quite ridiculous, really.

To see this amazing app in action, there's a deployment at cats.meancat.com, at least until I get bored and shut the EB environment down.

The Pushbullet API returns a JSON response if an error has occurred:

• type - A machine-readable code to refer to this type of error. Either invalid_request for client side errors or server for server side errors.
• message - A (mostly) human-readable error message.
• param - (OPTIONAL) Appears sometimes during an invalid_request error to say which parameter in the request caused the error.
• cat - Some sort of ASCII cat to offset the pain of receiving an error message.

Example:

{
  "error": {
      "message": "The resource could not be found.",
      "type": "invalid_request",
      "cat": "~(=^‥^)"
  }
}

And I thought, 'if only there was a web service to generate all those ascii cats....' which is a ridiculous thought to have.. but there you go.