What is REST?

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a term often used in software engineering when talking about services or other API's. A lot of these so-called RESTful services or interfaces are not RESTful at all. Even the author of REST gets frustrated by the common misuse; http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven: "I am getting frustrated by the number of people calling any HTTP-based interface a REST API.". REST is often confused with an application of REST to HTTP and URI (uniform resource identifier). An URI is a unique identifier to identify a web resource. HTTP is a transport protocol used to interact with the web resource. REST however is a bit more then just that. The division between resource identification and resource interaction is important. The application of REST uses the URI to identify a concept. In this blog post I will elaborate a bit more on REST while trying to avoid literally repeating other sources like Wikipedia. I will also provide some background and examples I found during my short study of the concept. In addition, this post will be introductory to other more (Oracle) implementation focused articles.

MockServer: Easy mocking of HTTP(S) services (e.g. SOAP or JSON)

Testing services as an atomic entity can be difficult. Especially if these services are part of a call chain or call other services. Often in such cases mock services are developed to reduce test dependencies and exclude services which are not interesting to the specific test case. For example, I'm testing service A. Service A calls service B. I'm not interested in service B (or service B is maintained by another department on which I don't want to depend). I would mock service B when testing service A in this case. There are several methods to create mock services. These methods however are mostly not easily usable by testers since they require developing/coding mock services. Testers would benefit from being able to create their own mock services in order to create different tests for a specific service.

In this blog post I provide a brief introduction and describe some features of MockServer. An open source product which can be used to mock services. For a more detailed article (with more examples) you can look at the following written by my colleague Robert van Mölken: http://technology.amis.nl/2014/03/06/functional-boundary-testing-of-a-service-based-environment-using-mockserver/

The below image was taken from http://www.mock-server.com/