DevConf.cz 2016

REST does not come with an in-built contract compliance mechanism, which in many ways is a great thing (no cumbersome xml schemas). However, while working with microservice-based systems, it often appears that a practical mechanism that would provide help in shaping and describing REST contracts would come in handy.

Similarly, creating integration and acceptance tests in such systems presents many challenges. On one hand, we want to make the development and deployment of each service independent and agile, so we tend to use stubs, on the other hand, if we are not able to carry out proper E2E tests, we want to make sure that at any point in time, our stubs are in keeping with how are server actually responds to any given request.

In this talk, I will present Accurest, a tool that allows for both: easily shaping REST contracts and verifying if our app adheres to them. I will show how, using Accurest, we can quickly generate automatically-tested stubs from simple groovy DSL scripts. I will talk about the typical usages and script examples, as well as possible problems and ways of handling them.