Lately I’ve noticed that more and more service seem to include API testing in their list of services. For instance this week at Chirp, Twitter announced their development console available on dev.twitter.com which gives you the ability to test the API without really having to write any code just yet.
This feature is also well known for people using Hurl which is a website that you can use to make HTTP requests and test your API responses. Also on OSX there’s the HTTP Client Tool which does more or less the same as the ones above.
Another company that announced this feature this week was Apigee:
Use the API Console to review an API’s structure, experiment with the endpoint, and review the request and response messages. We’re launching with support for Twitter APIs and are adding more soon
Apigee is basically an analytics tool for your API. It allows you to track requests, users, errors, etc. So for them, implementing the API tester is something that makes sense as they provide statistics for you API, if you notice an error, you should be able to just test the API call and see if you can reproduce from within Apigee.
All those companies do really cool things, however now I’d like to talk about ourselves a bit here. In Frapi we’ve had a similar feature for quite some time now in order to help our own developers testing and debugging their API. Here’s a little introductory video on how to create an action and test it from within Frapi.
Obviously Frapi is on the verge of getting released to the public and we are really eager to get it out. That sort of feature is the reason why we built Frapi 🙂 To make your lives easier when developing APIs. What do you think?
