cats VS RESTest

Out of this frustration I've built: https://github.com/Endava/cats. It's for APIs, but mostly addressing exactly this case: don't use strings for everything, if you choose to use it though, make sure you add patterns for checking if things are valid, make sure you think about all the corner cases and all the weird characters that can brake you app, and so on.

If the API has an OpenAPI spec available, you can use: https://github.com/Endava/cats

This is why we need better tools which will give benefits for the added complexity. If you need to create both the feature files AND the code, it's just complexity with little benefits. But frameworks like https://github.com/karatelabs/karate or https://github.com/Endava/cats are hiding this complexity and remove the code layer entirely. Which, in my view, this is where you need to be in 2023, particularly for API testing.

I've built a tool specifically to test if these kind of characters will reach API backends: https://github.com/Endava/cats. My idea was that APIs should explicitly reject or sanitise input containing such characters.

Cats by Endava

Because the OpenAPI Specification is so widely used and agreed upon across the industry, numerous tools have been built to simplify the task of API development. There are tools to validate requests (such as Dredd or RESTest), automate the writing of API documentation (such as Stoplight or DeveloperHub), and even generate SDK code for many client languages (such as APIMatic CodeGen or OpenAPI Generator). While an API developer can certainly go it alone and build without any assistance, it’s certainly helpful to have many toolchain options when building an OAS-conformant API.