One of the major benefits of using HTTP as transport is the wide availability of tools. For the most part, testing and debugging a web service may be performed using nothing more than a web browser. Apart from that, there are a lot of additional programs that may be helpful in automation. These include the following:
- The standard Unix file downloader wget
- The modern HTTP client curl
- Popular open source libraries such as libcurl, curlpp, C++ REST SDK, cpr (C++ HTTP requests library), and NFHTTP
- Testing frameworks such as Selenium or Robot Framework
- Browser extensions such as Boomerang
- Standalone solutions such as Postman and Postwoman
- Dedicated testing software including SoapUI and Katalon Studio
HTTP-based web services work by returning an HTTP response to an HTTP request that uses appropriate HTTP verbs (such as GET, POST, and PUT). The semantics of how the request and the response should look and what data they should convey differs from...
