Every day, thousands of people scroll through a news app to stay up to speed on the latest headlines and articles from across the world. But have you ever wondered how the news applications collect and distribute news stories from different sources and geographies right to your screens and palms?
This is where APIs excel, allowing them to service millions of requests while also providing information to all programs. APIs serve as interfaces via applications to exchanges information between two parties.
Since APIs are the foundation of every application, they must be thoroughly tested. Various API testing solutions are available on the market to guarantee that the API’s functional and non-functional behaviors match expectations. API testing tools guarantee that the application remains stable and that your experience is safe. As a result, API testing tools are critical for ensuring that every application runs smoothly and reliably.
What are APIs and API testing tools?
Have you ever wondered how Google Maps could pinpoint your present location and show you the nearest exit when you were trapped in the middle of who knows where? That’s the Google Maps API performing the work.
An API (Application Program Interface) is essentially the messenger that allows applications to share data and communicate with one another. But how does an application stay completely functional at all times while protecting user privacy? The answer is API testing tools.
Benefits of API testing in Agile
Using API testing tools is how development and testing teams qualify app performance before they make their way into the users’ hands through smartphones. The key advantages for QAs and developers, now driven by Agile principles, are:
- Enable early testing and feedback without requiring complete application development.
- Faster test maintenance and refactoring.
- Identify more faults and issues faster than using UI testing.
API Tools You Must Consider
API testing tools help you automate the testing process, making it more efficient and thorough. These application programs are intended to test and validate the functionality, performance, security, and dependability of application programming interfaces (APIs). Each instrument has distinct strengths and capabilities intended to meet a wide range of testing requirements. Let’s talk about the major API testing tools:
Airborne
Airborne is an open-source Ruby framework built on top of RSpec. RSpec is a widely used behavior-driven development (BDD) testing tool in the Ruby community. Airborne makes testing RESTful APIs easier by offering a collection of useful methods and matches for sending HTTP queries and evaluating answers. Airborne API automation framework includes a simple and readable DSL (Domain-Specific Language) that makes it easy for developers and testers to write tests. Airborne is built with JSON in mind, making it simple to parse, verify, and change JSON response bodies in tests.
Postman
Postman is a REST client that began as a Chrome browser plugin but has lately released native versions for Mac and Windows. They have also just introduced an AI capability called PostBot.
At a high level, it allows you to send a post request to your web server and receive a response. It allows you to configure all of the headers and cookies that your API requires and then inspect the response when it arrives.
Karate DSL
Karate lets you write a test that sequences calls to any web service (SOPA or REST) and ensures that the results are as anticipated. If you’re a tester, this is a very tester-focused program that doesn’t require any coding knowledge. This tool has been so popular that we’ve prepared two free test guide courses to help you get up to speed quickly.
Karate is recognized for being simple to understand and, hence, easily maintainable. This is an often ignored component of selecting an API automation framework since test suites are utilized for continuous integration when the API is live in production.
Google Apigee
Google Apigee is a full cross-cloud API management platform that includes tools for creating, managing, securing, and testing APIs. Its unified testing features enable developers and testers to conduct functional, performance, and security assessments on APIs throughout the development process.
It offers extensive analytics and monitoring capabilities for tracking API usage, performance metrics, traffic trends, and faults, allowing for data-driven decision-making and optimization. It incorporates strong security measures, including OAuth, JWT validation, access control, and threat prevention.
SoapUI
SoapUI is a popular open-source API testing tool for REST, SOAP, and GraphQL APIs. It is a comprehensive API testing tool, with a major emphasis on developer and tester ease of use. Its user-friendly graphical user interface enables automation for functional, regression, and load testing. SoapUI is primarily used for comprehensive RESTful API and SOAP Web Service testing.
This tool supports sophisticated assertion libraries like AssertJ, which helps you create fluent assertions in the Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) paradigm. It connects with CI/CD pipelines to automate testing, making it an important tool in DevOps processes. It offers security testing capabilities to detect and remediate API issues.
Apache JMeter
JMeter is a famous open-source performance testing tool that uses Java to evaluate and monitor the performance of various services, such as web services (APIs), databases, network services, and so on. Apache JMeter excels at running functional and performance tests for REST and SOAP.
REST is a collection of standards for creating web services that employ URL-identified resources and are usually stateless. SOAP is a protocol for transferring messages between web services that operate on an XML-based message-oriented architecture. JMeter’s strength rests in its ability to simulate a large number of queries, allowing you to evaluate API performance across a variety of circumstances.
Reflect
Reflect is an AI-powered automated regression testing tool with built-in API testing capabilities. Reflect allows you to easily develop comprehensive end-to-end tests without having to write a single line of code. You may run API tests and UI tests concurrently to provide a full, end-to-end testing solution.
With Reflect’s no-code test generator, you can easily extract data and make assertions using a user-friendly interface, making API testing accessible to anyone without coding skills.
Final Note
As application development teams grow more technologically savvy, API testing has set the standard for automated testing. More tools will be created to address these demands. Despite the difficulties of finding a tool that can accomplish everything, adopting a toolset that fits a company’s demands while increasing income is critical. Before deciding on an API testing tool, consider how each is best suited for certain applications and what capabilities are essential for your application development workflow.
