According to Michael Giller’s blog, published on October 5, 2016, Google has announced that it will be terminating support for apps in the Chrome browser on Windows, Mac and Linux. This announcement will affect any user interacting with REST API. I guess this is another approach by the giant tech corporation to sell more of its products by scaring consumers who are using apps like Postman, Advanced REST Client, and Boomerang in the Chrome browser. Google has given July 2017 as the last date to be fully executing this decision. What are some of the alternative options for the users who have been using Chrome browser for apps on Windows, Mac and Linux. It turns out that users have three possible options.
Frist, which is the most obvious and no brainer, but costly, is to buy Chromebook. Chromebook has Chrome OS and it is Google’s own product which will come with all these capabilities and users will not have to worry about anything. I believe, this is what Google wants too. I think Google strategy is to market its Chromebook by restricting and providing some feature strictly to Chromebook. We know from history; this is what Microsoft did back in the day when Netscape came out by providing Internet Explorer as a package with Microsoft Windows. This might not be the exact same situation, but the goals are similar.
Second option that consumer has is to move from Chrome apps to corresponding standalone app for testing REST APIs. Right now, Postman is the only one who provides a standalone app for Mac and Windows, but Advanced REST Client has promised to publish its own standalone version soon. So, this can be another possible options for the consumers who are depending on Chrome apps for testing their REST APIs. By going with this option you might have to go through some hassles and that would be that previously everything that were handled by Chrome your standalone app has to provide all those functionalities. For example, the standalone app has to manage its own authentication and connectivity, Proxy auto-detection, web form authentication, cookie handling, support for IPv6 and HTTP 2.0 protocols.
Third option is to switch to another API testing. There are plenty of free and open source tool like SoapUI and Ready! API both of them are great alternatives to Chrome apps that can increase your API testing experience. Here are some of benefits you can get from SoapUI:
- TestCases in SoapUI (same as Collections in Postman) allow you to string together calls for REST APIs, JDBC and SOAP. This will let you validate the backend data and any SOAP to REST migrations
- Convert your SoapUI TestCases to a load test in a few clicks
Set up security tests against your API
- Easily mock up / stub out / virtualize an API to get particular responses or start API interactions before a real API is available
- SoapUI is available across all operating systems and your projects can be shared and run in any major operating system (Giller)
These functionalities can be even taken one step further by adapting Ready! API. This platform has more functionality and tools than SoapUI. Here are some of the extra tools that Ready! API includes:
- Configuring your tests against external data sources
- Advanced reporting
- Load testing, security testing, and service virtualization
- Professional support and other enterprise features (Giller)
Google’s decision of limiting Chrome apps functionality to Chrome OS is an inconvenience for many users who are using REST APIs and Chrome apps for a long time. It will not be easy to make a quick adaption to another API or tool, but the good news is that we have alternative options that are in some cases better and free. We should definitely at least consider those options and if possible adopt them.
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From the blog CS443 Software Quality Assurance & Testing – Computer Science World by Haider Hussain and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
