The last couple of weeks we’ve been working on a big integration project. The largest real estate portal of The Netherlands, Funda, uses Floorplanner to deliver interactive floor plans to their clients. They use our API’s to seamlessly integrate the Floorplanner into their back end system and front end website.

One of our API’s is our RESTful web service. With it one can manage users, project, floors, designs etc. We set up a whole testing suite around it, but every now and then I wanted to test a single method by hand. For this I used the command line tool cURL which looks something like this (getting all users):

curl -H "Content-Type: application/xml" 
-u "username:password" 
-X GET https://floorplanner.com/users.xml

It works, but it’s kind of a hassle. One day Michel showed me HTTP Client:

A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages.

HTTP Client makes testing a web service by hand much easier. You can select any REST method you need from a pull down menu. Setting up your header is done by a few mouse clicks and the result is nicely formatted.

The only thing that didn’t seem to work out of the box was Basic HTTP Authentication. I found a workaround for this: add the authorization to the header myself. To do this use “Authorization” as header name. For the header value you have to encode the username and password with Base64 with a “:” as separator. For example in PHP: base64_encode(username:password). There are also a couple of websites around where you can encode a string to Base64. When you have the encoded string, you can add “Basic encoded string here” as a header value and you’re ready to roll.