Postman Course And Certification

What is Postman?

Postman is a special API Client that helps developers easily create, share, test and document robust APIs. 

To understand what the Postman client is, we first need to understand what API is. 

API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface, which defines how one component of an application should communicate with the other. It is made up of a set of protocols, routines, and tools for developing software applications. 

API Testing is a kind of software testing that requires the testing of the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) directly and as a component of integration testing to find out if they meet up with the expectation for functionality, performance, reliability, and security. Since APIs generally lack a GUI, API Testing is conducted at the message layer. 

API Testing is now deemed critical for Automation Testing because APIs now work as the primary interface to software application logic and because carrying out GUI tests are more hard to manage with the short release cycles of software and with constant and frequent changes that are commonly used with Agile software development and DevOps.

Postman is presently one of the most popular tools that are used in API testing. It started in 2012 as just a side project by Abhinav Asthana to clarify and simplify the API workflow in development and testing. API allows software applications to interact with each other through API calls.

Features of Postman

There are many features of Postman and some of them are:

1. API Testing: This feature provides an environment for API developers to test the functionality, efficiency, and data accuracy of their API.

2. Data Security: This allows API users to secure access to the data that is accessed from the API. It provides extra support for various security practices like attack mitigation, IP whitelisting, and data encryption.

3. App Integration: This is the functionality with which APIs are integrated with and work within third-party applications.

4. Plugins: Plugins in Postman provides extra functionality for more increased security, analytic tools, monitoring, and other features that are not included in the native feature set.

5. Scalability: The scalability of your applications expands the functionality while maintaining the balanced loads.

Benefits of Postman

There are many benefits of Postman and some of them are;

1. Accessibility: To make use of Postman, you would just need to log-into your own accounts, and this makes it easy to access your files anytime, and anywhere as long as a Postman application is installed on the computer that you are on.

2. Use of Collections: Postman lets users design various collections for your  API calls. Each collection can produce subfolders and several API requests. This helps in organizing your test suites and cases.

3. Collaboration: Various environments and collections can be imported or exported therefore making it easy to share files and information. A direct link can also be generated to share your collections to others.

4. Creation of Tests: Various test checkpoints such as verifying for a successful HTTP response status can be included in each API call which helps guarantee test coverage.

5. Automation Testing: Through the use of the Collection Runner or Newman in Postman, various tests can be run in various iterations which saves time for carrying out repetitive tests.

6. Debugging: The Postman console helps you to check what data has been reclaimed by making it easy to debug tests.