Unleashing the Power of Advanced Rest Client (ARC)

In today’s API-driven world, the Advanced Rest Client (ARC) stands as a reliable and efficient tool for testing, debugging, and interacting with RESTful APIs. In this blog, I will describe how a manual tester who is a beginner and new to API testing and looking for a lightweight and straightforward tool to explore and learn can use Advance Rest Client (ARC). This blog post serves as a comprehensive guide to ARC, highlighting its features and benefits.

Introduction to ARC:

Advance rest client is a powerful, lightweight API testing tool that provides a clean and simple user interface to create test cases for API testing by sending an HTTP Request to APIs, validation of responses against the expected result, and validation of response code/errors/issues. It also provides the history feature for quickly accessing the previously sent requests.

Here, the user can specify the request method (Get/Post/Delete/Put/Patch), set the header, add query parameters, and Request payload in JSON/XML format.

Users can download the ARC desktop application using this link: https://www.advancedrestclient.com/install

Here is an example of how to use Basic Authentication with ARC (Advanced Rest Client) using a dummy API: In the below example, I have used the create user API by selecting ‘Basic Auth’ as the authorization type and passing authorization parameters.

In this example, you can effectively examine and analyze the API Response body, inspect headers, review the status code, and observe the response time for measuring the performance of the API.

ARC provides clean and easy-to-understand API responses. It helps users to examine the API responses in a readable way, to view header responses, their response timings, status codes, and response data in raw format.

ARC enhances efficiency and focuses on communication among team members by allowing them to create and manage requests in collections and enables seamless collaboration by providing a shared repository of requests among team members to access, add new test cases, track progress, and review processes and at a time multiple team members can work on the same collection.

ARC Benefits:

Advance rest client offers several benefits; here I am listing a few:

• Provides an easy-to-use and friendly interface for API testing to both beginners and advanced testers to have an efficient testing experience.
• Supports a variety of request types, and authentication methods. Testers can set query parameters, custom headers, and request payloads according to the different API needs and scenarios.
• Provides various authentication support like Basic, Bearer, NTLM, OAuth 2, Open Id, and Client Certificate along with the simple UI for setup and authentication mechanism for API testing.
• Provides an API response in a clear, readable format, making it easy for testers to validate the response status code, response time, and response header to ensure the actual behavior with the expected behavior of provided API.
• Provides a history feature to view/access/execute past API requests.
• It allows users to import/export API requests.
• ARC can generate code snippets for users in different programming languages (Curl, HTTP, JavaScript, Python, C, and Java) giving the language flexibility to a developer working with APIs that helps in enhancing productivity and can customize code according to their requirements.

As you know, Postman is also one of the most widely used software tools for API testing that offers a variety of feature sets. Here I am listing a few differences between Postman and ARC:

ARC	POSTMAN
It offers a simple and lightweight user interface with some limitations in terms of functionalities.	It offers a more feature-rich user interface and offers a wide range of tools and functionalities.
It also supports sharing collections but does not provide built-in collaboration and team management features as Postman does.	It offers built-in features for collaboration and team management.
Mock server feature is not available.	It has the ability to create mock servers for simulating the behavior of APIs during development and testing.
It offers better performance and faster response time than Postman because of its lightweight design.	It consumes significant system resources because of an extensive feature set.
It is completely free and does not require a subscription.	It offers a paid version with more features.

Conclusion:

If you are a beginner and new to API testing and looking for a lightweight and straightforward tool to explore, learn, and understand the API Behavior then ARC is a good option because of its simple and easy-to-understand interface, making it accessible for those users who are new to API testing. Advanced rest client tool offers a very friendly user interface for constructing and sending HTTP requests and then examining the response and validating the API request results. 

ARC does not require a subscription or license that is beneficial for small teams or individual who is looking to perform API Testing without incurring additional cost.

Both Postman and ARC offer a wide range of features because of the open-source tool, making it accessible for the user for API development and API Testing. The above-mentioned benefits are subject to individual preferences, project requirements, external factors, the complexity of APIs, budget, and testing tasks. 

It is important to note that ARC may be suitable for smaller and simpler applications but it does lack some advanced features and capabilities compared to Postman. The choice between these tools is depend on the requirements, preferences, and testing task at hand. Overall, the Advance Rest Client is a powerful, simpler, and lightweight tool for testing and debugging APIs.