How do you test if the incoming API Calls to back-ends are correct?
How do you test if the front end behaves properly on APIs returning errors?
How do you test the front end before the back end is ready?
The New Emerging Architecture
With the emergence of Smartphones and HTML5, the front end of application software has clearly separated from the back end. The MVC5 of Microsoft, Java, PHP, Android, and iOS allows a clear separation of the front-end and back-end. in a typical environment, the Back-end applications usually expose themselves as REST API to which the front-end calls using XML or lately JSON.
The Gap
While there are many tools to test the Back-End, the database access, the API testing, and back-end security, there are few tools to check the API Calls! The problem is aggravated when the APIs are third-party APIs to which you do not have access.
What do we do?
The only way would be to capture the API calls from our front end Bounce back the expected (contracted) reply from the server and check against that.
Such a tool could also return HTTP status 200, 300, 404, 500, and other errors, enabling us to test the front end under different API return values! Test out HTTP and the new HTTP/2 protocols.
iBounce – API Testing Tool
At InApp we have developed an effective API Testing Tool to do precisely that. We call it iBounce! This API Testing Tool has increased our productivity tremendously by helping us develop the front-end of applications, which consume public APIs, and helped us in developing the Front-End and Back-End by two teams asynchronously. Thus the front-end and back-end teams are not waiting perpetually for each other; Solving a lot of project management deadlocks.
