Currently in the market you can see a lot of REST clients. You can probably remember the Fiddler as primary tool for watching of what’s happening on your local machine and doing GET, POST and other Http requests.
More and more developers are using much easier approaches like REST Client plug-ins in the browser.
Here is a list with I had experience to work with in the past :
- RESTClient, a debugger for RESTful web services My favorite REST Client because you can save requests, headers, body data, Content-Type to the favorites or to the file. Later on you can send file to your colleague or to the client for testing purpose.
- Rest Console plug-in for Google Chrome.
- Fiddler2 – written by one guy from Microsoft, bought by Telerik company later. If you want to hack your requests you should go with Fiddler.
- SOAP UI – Useful and powerful tool for SOAP web services.
When I was watching Build2014 conference videos I’ve found interesting NEW plug-in called Postman. In a session with my Idol Scott Hanselman I saw new way to setup REST web service. You need install plug-in Postman in the Chrome and press Collections button. There you can find another button for importing web service metadata.
The good thing is that you can easily add file or point to the web service where is your web service metadata defined.
Using Web Essentials for Microsoft Web API you can have that metadata easily!
In my case for FormSchema project we are using ServiceStack engine to build nice REST web service. The long time ago they had similar approach – integration web service metadata with swagger plug-in.
How it works ?
On each action of your web service you put some documentation : name, http verb definition, description, parameter type. And then you have it in your test environment, you can immediately test it on the browser.
If you want to see real example how it works, please visit FormSchema web site, create an account (It’s total free) and press it on REST Client button. Some screenshots from swagger plug-in adopted for REST service are placed below
Developers home page of FormSchema – http://developers.formschema.com/
Press on that nice Internet-Foxy-Chrome image and you will be forwarded to the testing environment. All actions are described and you can start do testing
Last thing is press something 🙂
I’ve chosen client – ping action which checks your API Token and responses result either true or false.
For each action you can see request parameters, descriptions, urls, response headers and of course response itself.
That’s it for now. Please try it now and get you feedback.
I’m curious if there is any chance integrate Postman with ServiceStack ? If you know the answer, please let me know.
Domantas Jovaišas - Tech Notes 
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