Tony Vu, Puppet Labs
Web APIs are the backbone for our daily Internet life. When functioning smoothly, services go unnoticed as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS paint a magical world on top of them. However, when the services go down, everything comes to a grinding halt. In the fifteen years since Roy Fielding’s dissertation on REST [1], there has been significant growth in avenues available for testing RESTful Web APIs. There is now a wealth of products and several competing platforms available to test your own API. However, with this wealth of options comes confusion, as the speed of growth makes today’s testing tomorrow’s ruinous remains of a once gloriously conceived testing solution.
Assembling and building your own RESTful wrappers for testing services gives you the opportunity to share your tool with other elements of your organization, such as other quality engineers or other development engineers not familiar with your product space. The upfront cost will be higher than implementing a commercial service to test your API, but the resulting library will eliminate the siloing effect of isolated test code and tools, unusable by other members of your organization. For the purposes of this paper, we will consider RESTful wrappers to be a kind of library, and will use the term ‘“library” and “tool” to mean “RESTful wrapper” unless otherwise specified.
This paper is organized into two sections:
- An argument for quality engineers to create RESTful Wrappers meant to be shared with cross-functional teams.
- An in-depth study of building such a library for RESTful services.
Target Audience: Advanced
2015 Technical Paper, Tony Vu, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video
