RESTClient tool to test RESTful web services

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• Testing RESTful web services with the cURL command line tool
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• Web Services Interview Questions and Answers - RESTful Web Service Overview
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The http://www.wiztools.org/ has some handy open source Java tools like RESTClient, Regular Expression Tester, etc. RESTClient tool is GUI based and a good alternative to the Unix command line based tool CURL and the Firefox poster plugin. SoapUI is another GUI based client for both RESTful and SOAP based web services. This blog posts shows how easy it is to get started with RESTClient tool from WizTools. The example below shows a POST request as the GET requests are easier to test. The diagrams below illustrates posting of JSON data. The RESTful web service operations GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE correlates with the database CRUD operations Read, Create, Update, and Delete respectively.

Step 1: From WizTools click on the link to RESTClient.

Step 2: Download the JAR file "restclient-cli-3.1-jar-with-dependencies.jar". Create a short cut to the jar file. Double clicking on the short cut will open the RESTClient GUI as shown below. You can type in the URL and select "POST" as the HTTP method.

Take note of the HTTP headers passed with the request.


Step 3: You need to select the "Content-Type" that you want to post. Select  "application/json" as the content-type.

The GET requests are very straight forward requiring only the URL.


The SoapUI tool requires a WADL file for the RESTFul web services. Here is an example of SOAP Web Service using the SoapUI tool.


Related posts to test web services

• Testing RESTful web services with the cURL command line tool
• SoapUI for Web Service tetsing
• Web Services Interview Questions and Answers - RESTful Web Service Overview
• Firebug poster plugin.