Simulating ESI's when working on localhost

I've started using ESI's in Akamai. They work perfectly fine when I've got a site running on int/test/stage/production environments which actually run through Akamai.

However, when we work locally on a PC, we tend to just use a simple jetty server and the site is not served using Akamai. This makes it a bit challenging to see if the work is correct without deploying our solution to Akamai.

Is there a way to simulate an ESI locally for development without using Akamai?

I could not find any official way of doing this, so I emulated a ESI on the server side as if it were an SSI, using an IF statement in our freemarker.

I use spring, freemarker + java to do this solution:

1) Create a macro that will decide to use the ESI or emulate it via SSI if running local (noescape may not be required, depends how you have set things up)

<#macro esi url>
  <#if esiUrl?contains("localhost")>
    <#noescape>${ssiInclude(url)}</#noescape>
  <#else>
    <esi:include src="${esiUrl}/${url}" />
  </#if>
</#macro>

2) use the macro with the url <@html.esi url="my/url" />

3) Exposed the SSI Include method in java/spring (you'll need to have setup some environment specific values for esiUrl and the sites base url)

<bean id="freemarkerViewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.freemarker.FreeMarkerViewResolver">
    ......
    <property name="attributesMap" ref="staticAttributesMap"/>
</bean>

<util:map id="staticAttributesMap">
    <entry key="esiUrl" value="${esi.url}" />

    <!-- formatters -->
    <entry key="ssiInclude" >
        <bean class="com.channel4.bips.web.freemarker.SsiIncludeMethodModel">
            <property name="urlBase" value="${base.url}/"/>
        </bean>
    </entry>

</util:map>

4) The java to emulate a SSI in freemarker

import freemarker.template.TemplateMethodModel;
import freemarker.template.TemplateModelException;
import org.apache.commons.lang.Validate;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.Reader;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.List;

public class SsiIncludeMethodModel implements TemplateMethodModel {
    private String urlBase;

    @Override
    public Object exec(List list) throws TemplateModelException {
        String uri = (String) list.get(0);
        Validate.notNull(uri);
        return readContents(urlBase + uri.trim());
    }

    public String readContents(String address) {
        StringBuilder contents = new StringBuilder(2048);
        BufferedReader br = null;

        try {
            URL url = new URL(address);
            br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));
            String line;
            while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
                contents.append(line);
            }
        } catch (IOException x) {
            x.printStackTrace();
            return "Error getting SSI data";
        } finally {
            close(br);
        }

        return contents.toString();
    }

    private static void close(Reader br) {
        try {
            if (br != null) {
                br.close();
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    public void setUrlBase(String urlBase) {
        this.urlBase = urlBase;
    }
}