Tool Demonstration: Testing JSON Web Services Using Jsongen (Demostración)

Abstract

This article describes a tool, jsongen, which permits testing behavioural aspects of Web Services that communicate using the JSON data format. Provided a characterisation of the JSON data as a JSON schema, the jsongen tool will: (i) automatically derive a QuickCheck (the property-based testing tool) generator which can generate an infinite number of JSON values that validate against the schema, and (ii) provides a generic QuickCheck state machine which is capable of following the (hyper)links documented in the JSON schema, to automatically explore the web service. The default behaviour of the state machine can be easily customized to include web service specific checks. The approach is demonstrated by applying it to the task of testing a simplified web service for banking.