Basics of Postman
Postman is used primarily for API testing where we test whether our API meets certain expectations for our outputs and check for reliability, performance testing, how functional it may be in our application.
API’s are fairly prevalent in our day to day programming as it can lead to clean and integrated programs. Postman leads us into a world of testing our REST API’s in a way that acts like JavaScript which runs our Postman request letting us input our headers and cookies it may expect.
There are two main API calls to stick to, HTTP Requests and HTTP Response. An HTTP request involves request methods such as
POST (creating/updating data),
PUT (updating data),
GET (retrieving data),
DELETE. Under the request URL is where your http request will go and under the request header is where you’ll store key-value pairs such as the authorization or content type.
HTTP response they return the body, cookies, headers, tests, status codes and the API response time and organizes these in separate tabs. Having the response status codes can be very useful in identifying any defects in our request or if it was successful.
Status codes are organized in such a way that 100 codes are temp responses, 200 codes mean the client is successfully accepting the request and being processed, 300 codes would mean most of the codes are meant for URL redirection, 400 errors are going to be client-side based and 500 are server side based.
There are many useful API’s out there ready for you to implement them into your program, and with this information you can figure out the requirements for the API you wish to use in your application.
Through API testing we can further implement the use of published API’s in our local programs making for an efficient application.
