6 Best REST API Tools for Testing, Design, and Development by javinpaul Javarevisited

Manual testing is often too time-consuming and tends to neglect edge cases and vulnerabilities that stem from the communication between services. It is a software architecture style that relies on a stateless communications protocol, most commonly, HTTP. REST structures data in XML, YAML, or any other format that is machine-readable, but usually JSON is most widely used. REST follows the object-oriented programming paradigm of noun-verb. REST is very data-driven, compared to SOAP, which is strongly function-driven.

Just install this little tool and source and you can start testing your REST APIs from the command line. Earlier, I have shared the best books and courses for RESTful web services and in this article, I am going to share five awesome but easily accessible and free tools to test your REST APIs. POST − This method is used for creating new entities, as well as to send data to server, such as customer information, file upload, etc. through HTML forms. Here, we’ll discuss the role that API testing plays in an API-first world—and clarify the relationship between API testing and API monitoring.

What is REST API Testing?

For those responses in JSON or XML format, it is easy to get the value of a given key or attribute. Hence, this method is helpful when verifying dynamic content, or individual value rather than the whole content. Testing APIs requires managing a large amount of data, including data storage, formatting, API requests, and responses. Ensuring that the data is correct and up-to-date is crucial for accurate testing. The tool is ideal for web application demand and performance testing.

That may improve the speed of a test execution and will provide you with more detailed stack traces. The same way we tested a web site, Codeception allows you to test web services. They are very hard to test manually, so it’s a really good idea to automate web service api testing best practices testing. We have SOAP and REST as standards, which are represented in corresponding modules, which we will cover in this chapter. It is one of the base URLs through which the endpoint paths are appended. In simple words, it’s a base address for the specific API.

How to Do API Testing

Moreover, JMeter 5.4 came out in December 2020 with additional bug fixes and core enhancements. The user experience is also better than the previous versions. However, for additional features, it costs $12 for each user per month. Positive testsare designed to check the basic functionality of the API using required parameters as well as extra functionality using optional parameters. This type of API test sends a large number of randomized requests to see if your API responds with errors, processes any of these inputs incorrectly, or crashes. These API tests are designed to evaluate the actual running of the API and typically focus on monitoring, execution errors, resource leaks, or error detection.

SoapUI supports extensive testing of RESTful web services and their resources, representations, and so on. Suppose a client has made the request by REST API. The REST API transfers a representation of the resource’s state to the endpoint . REST APIs have several HTTP methods which have request headers and response headers informing about the connection status and status code. Additionally, it can help to identify potential security vulnerabilities in the API before the software is released.

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The basic idea of REST is treating objects on the server-side (e.g rows in a database table) as resources that can be created or destroyed. When we say RESTful APIs we are referring to the web services implementation of REST architecture. When it comes to testing web applications, Rest API testing is a key strategy to evaluate the efficiency of Restful APIs.

It allows for accurate, repeatable, and efficient testing processes, crucial to keeping up with the speed and scope of today’s software development. For example, if you’re testing an HTTP API, then you can review the OpenAPI specification, which defines a standard, programming language-agnostic interface description for HTTP APIs. This specification details all the HTTP API’s objects, values, and parameters, how the objects are called, what each object does, and how they can be used together. The section below details how the Request Body Object is supposed to function, what its fixed fields are, what to expect when using this function, and request body examples. API testing tools provide user-friendly interfaces with minimal coding requirements that enable less experienced developers to deploy the tests. Unfortunately, since the tools are often designed to analyze general API issues, more specific problems with the tester’s API can go unnoticed.

Learn How to Secure Your REST APIs

Built-in Tools within Postman enable developers to use essential tools for engaging with APIs. These tools aim to simplify the API development workflow, delivering capabilities that boost the proficiency and impact of API interactions. Similarly, response headers contain a wealth of useful information regarding the processed request. To view the response headers, simply navigate to the headers tab in the response section. In the development lifecycle of an API, API testing is fundamental. It serves the purpose of verifying that all API endpoints are functioning correctly and meeting predefined criteria.

API testing is essential when developing software, as it tests several key indicators during the development process. API testing is usually conducted through the API itself or alongside integration testing. That’s all about some of the best tools to test your REST APIs and RESTful Web services. As a Java developer, I recommend you to write your test in code using RESTAssured but if you want interactive testing, curl is your best friend, particularly if you are in Linux.

Headers & Authentication

For 1xx, 2xx, and 3xx status codes, these really are not considered errors, rather informative message and will not necessarily affect the user experience. REST-Assured is a powerful tool that enables efficient evaluation of REST services within Java. As an open-source application, it provides seamless support for both XML and JSON formats for requests and responses.

• API testing is generally performed by using software to send calls to API endpoints to validate the system’s response.
• Testim also provides a wide range of assertions and verifications that you can use to validate the results of your API tests.
• This broader test coverage makes it easier to identify any bugs in the unit, database, and server levels.
• Positive testsare designed to check the basic functionality of the API using required parameters as well as extra functionality using optional parameters.
• This section explains how you can add assertions in ReadyAPI.

If you have any questions or feedback, please drop a note. SoapUI also supports all the standard protocols and technologies which means you can use it to test all kinds of APIs. Its design and interface are also very simple that enables both technical and non-technical users to use them seamlessly. Anyway, without any further ado, here are some tools you can https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ use to test your REST APIs or RESTful web services, as we Java developer calls them. I will also add more tools and their examples as and when I find them, but for now I have shared the tools and resources for further learning them. An API or Application Programming Interface is a set of programming instructions for accessing a web-based software application.

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APIs in the same category share some common information such as resource type, path, etc. Organizing your tests with the same structures will make your test reusable and extendable with integration flow. You should also avoid testing more than one API in a test case.