Earlier GUI testing was used to take place once the developers finish thier task and hand it over to the testing team. Test Engineers have little time to validate application both front end and back end application after development.
Fixing up defects/bugs raised by the testing team would take time and validate regressed defects. This is time consuming task.
API testing, testing will take place along with developers to validate all the functional services are validated at the early stage before the developer complete this development (aka Test Driven Development).
Automatic API test creation makes developing faster and clears up developers’ time to do other things, like write code. Automating also enables covering the full scope of tests: positive, negative, edge case, SQL injection, etc.
What is REST?
REST stands for Representational state transfer. It is a type of software testing that involves testing application programming interfaces (APIs) directly and as part of integration testing to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security. This testing lack GUI testing and it is performed at the Message layer.
What are RESTful Web Services?
In the REST architectural style, data and functionality are considered resources and are accessed using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), typically links on the Web. The resources are acted upon by using a set of simple, well-defined operations. The REST architectural style constrains an architecture to a client/server architecture and is designed to use a stateless communication protocol, typically HTTP. In the REST architecture style, clients and servers exchange representations of resources by using a standardized interface and protocol.
The following principles encourage RESTful applications to be simple, lightweight, and fast:
Resource identification through URI: A RESTful web service exposes a set of resources that identify the targets of the interaction with its clients. Resources are identified by URIs, which provide a global addressing space for resource and service discovery.
Uniform interface: Resources are manipulated using a fixed set of four create, read, update, delete operations: PUT, GET, POST, and DELETE. PUT creates a new resource, which can be then deleted by using DELETE. GET retrieves the current state of a resource in some representation. POST transfers a new state onto a resource. See Responding to HTTP Methods and Requests for more information.
Self-descriptive messages: Resources are decoupled from their representation so that their content can be accessed in a variety of formats, such as HTML, XML, plain text, PDF, JPEG, JSON, and others. Metadata about the resource is available and used, for example, to control caching, detect transmission errors, negotiate the appropriate representation format, and perform authentication or access control. See Responding to HTTP Methods and Requests and Using Entity Providers to Map HTTP Response and Request Entity Bodies for more information.
Stateful interactions through hyperlinks: Every interaction with a resource is stateless; that is, request messages are self-contained. Stateful interactions are based on the concept of explicit state transfer. Several techniques exist to exchange state, such as URI rewriting, cookies, and hidden form fields. State can be embedded in response messages to point to valid future states of the interaction. See Using Entity Providers to Map HTTP Response and Request Entity Bodies and “Building URIs” in the JAX-RS Overview document for more information.
Who's using REST?
All of Yahoo's web services use REST, including Flickr, del.icio.us API uses it, pubsub, bloglines, technorati, and both eBay, and Amazon have web services for both REST and SOAP.
Who's using SOAP?
Google seams to be consistent in implementing their web services to use SOAP, with the exception of Blogger, which uses XML-RPC. You will find SOAP web services in lots of enterprise software as well.
What is differences between RESTful web services and SOAP web services?
Is REST scalable and/or interoperable?
Yes, REST is scalable and interoperable.Does REST work with transport layer security (TLS)?
Yes. Transport Layer Security can encrypt the communication to a RESTful Webservice and authenticate the server to a client.Different kinds of HTTP status codes?
Refer: http://www.restapitutorial.com/httpstatuscodes.htmlWhat are idempotent operations?
An idempotent operation can be repeated an arbitrary number of times and the result will be the same as if it had been done only once. In arithmetic, adding zero to a number is idempotent.Idempotence is talked about a lot in the context of "RESTful" web services. REST seeks to maximally leverage HTTP to give programs access to web content, and is usually set in contrast to SOAP-based web services, which just tunnel remote procedure call style services inside HTTP requests and responses.
Idempotence plays an important role in REST. If you GET a representation of a REST resource (eg, GET a jpeg image from Flickr), and the operation fails, you can just repeat the GET again and again until the operation succeeds. To the web service, it doesn't matter how many times the image is gotten. Likewise, if you use a RESTful web service to update your Twitter account information, you can PUT the new information as many times as it takes in order to get confirmation from the web service. PUT-ing it a thousand times is the same as PUT-ing it once. Similarly DELETE-ing a REST resource a thousand times is the same as deleting it once. Idempotence thus makes it a lot easier to construct a web service that's resilient to communication errors.
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