Extend Iridium to support API testing

[mcasperson]

Iridium has a fairly comprehensive dialect for testing web applications, and there is some discussion around the possibility of extending this to support API testing.

To support API testing, we will need the following steps:

• Requesting HTTP endpoints with the various HTTP verbs (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, maybe others), dealing with headers
• Building request bodies with templates that can access alias variables (Freemarker could easily access the alias table as a model)
• Checks for response codes
• Checks for response headers
• Checks against the XML or JSON responses (maybe just schema validation?)
• Extraction of XML or JSON values into aliases (XPath and JSONPath)
• Authenticated requests (deal with schemes like OAuth and AWS request signing?)
• Deal with SSL certs, as a lot of APIs being tested will have self signed certs

[mcasperson]

This functionality would most likely be done in a seperate JAR that is imported into customised builds of Iridium: https://dzone.com/articles/extending-iridium-with-custom-step-definitions