When the HostBridge Service Test was developed about 8 years ago there weren’t many tools for quickly and easily testing web services. The tools that did exist were expensive.  Service Test let you test your services via a web page.  It formatted your XML output and fetched any associated debug output in a separate tab.  It also allowed you to save and share your tests with other developers.  It was easy to use and fulfilled our customer’s needs, but it has not aged well. We’ve developed a new and better way that uses Postman for testing web services.

We recorded James Alexander, HostBridge Director of Technical Services, demonstrating this web services testing approach:

You can download the slides from this presentation from the HostBridge Support Wiki.

This new test capability is important, because our customers are now writing more sophisticated services. These services may send and receive data in XML/RPC, XML/SOAP, JSON, JSON/SWAGGER, HTML or some combination thereof.  They are writing RESTFUL services, which means they need to send requests with various HTTP methods and headers.  Requests and responses have to be properly formatted.  Customers want to do all of this and still retain the features the Service Test tool provided, like fetching out of stream debug output and sharing tests.  And, of course, we understand that you’d like for it to be free.

Postman, a complete toolchain for API developers, is an excellent solution testing web services. Watch this video to learn how you can use Postman to do all of the testing previously done through the HostBridge Test Service, and more.

If you have any questions about using Postman to test the CICS web services you create, please use the form below to contact us: