POSTMAN — An Interesting Tool/Technology I Encountered In Preparation for Bootcamp
POSTMAN’s Logo, Source: Google Images.
It is a norm for technological tools to borrow the names of things that existed before them, this tradition not only makes the application or tool sound appealing, it also has a way of making its intended users feel at ease with it and give them a sense of connection, since the name of the tool is something they are all familiar with.
A Postman is someone responsible for the collection and delivery of letters and parcels. Three weeks to my bootcamp, I got to know Postman has another colourful and interesting meaning, Postman stylised POSTMAN is also a software/tool used by developers to test RESTful APIs. In simpler terms an API(Application Programming Interface) is boundary that allows easy exchange of resources between its providers and the consumers of the resources. This resources are usually data needed by users(consumers) of an application. An example of a resource provider is Oxford University Press, the company responsible for creating, maintaining and publishing Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press is able to share their large collection of words with its users by means of APIs written by application developers. APIs are not only limited to their owners for usage, they are also open to third parties and other app developers. For example Oxford University Press powers word search on Google, Microsoft, Amazon products by means of APIs.
APIs are the communication interfaces to developers, just the way users see Graphical User Interface. Considering how important APIs are to businesses, technological firms etc. It is very important to test APIs built before they are integrated into the application and the user interface, this is the point where API testing applications like POSTMAN and other similar apps come in.
POSTMAN is able to test APIs for the correct responses without a high level of technical sophistication required by the user, all that needs to be done is to follow the finely-crafted documentation of the app and also leverage its awesome and easy-to-use interface. On my first encounter with the application, it was not hard to tell what it does. Think of resources exchanged between a server and the client browser as letters and parcels, theses items need to be collected and delivered by someone, in this case, that person is POSTMAN, the virtual version of a traditional postman.
A screenshot of the POSTMAN app when been started, with a very catchy and brilliant message ‘Opening control values to antimatter nacelles…’ Image Source: Victor Ajayi, Instagram @saintvictormaria
POSTMAN is a perfect tool for carrying out both simple and complex operations by both developers and none developers. This test tool is being used by millions of developers worldwide, this means there is very strong community backing and wide acceptance of the tool. Companies like Big Fish Games are not left out of this beauty, POSTMAN is a collaborative tool the gaming company uses for testing its own RESTful APIs.
Also on the list of things to know about POSTMAN:
- It is a free/paid app that accommodates everyone with different budget plans
- It allows automated testing.
- It is suitable for Powerful Data Driven Tests involving data loaded from Excel spreadsheets, files and databases.
- Testing via drag-and-drop and point-and-click are very possible with POSTMAN.
- It can be used for security scans in an application.
- POSTMAN can work with binary, raw, JSON, form-data and x-www-form-encodedurl formats of data for sending POST requests (information) to a web application over the Internet.
- POSTMAN is suitable for testing applications on your local system and the ones hosted on the cloud.
- As of 2018, POSTMAN falls within the top three API testing tools of various rankings.
Regardless of your level of expertise, POSTMAN can meet all your needs regarding API testing.