Here are a few tools that I was surprised even existed when I first ran into them because they address pretty niche needs, but it’s awesome that they do. I found these very handy for my various cloud integration projects. Think of the convenience of code playgrounds such as Codepen, but applied to inter-SaaS piping and testing:
- Mockaroo, YDE, JSON Generator – generate realistic test data in CSV, JSON, SQL, and Excel formats. Nice to populate new tools so that they’re not empty shells when you’re trialing them.
- RequestBin, Webhook Inbox – Gives you a URL that will collect requests made to it and let you inspect them in a human-friendly way. Insta-webhook testing.
- Webscript.io – Just choose a URL and type in a LUA script.
- Hook.io – Microservice hosting, so combines webhook hosting with a datastore and scripting in a variety of languages.
- Ngrok – Secure tunnels to localhost. Great to work locally with webhooks.
- Webhooks.io – Webhooks proxy.
- JSON Test – To use, make a request to servicename.jsontest.com, where servicename is the name of a service including returning your IP address, HTTP headers. date & time, and more.
- Best Buy API Playground – an API training tool for students, educators and other learners to explore the possibilities of a fully functional RESTful API in a simple, non-production environment.
- Streamdata.io – turn polling APIs into a streamed push.
- Azure Functions – “serverless” is about as meaningless as the “no software” claim that Salesforce used to make, but AF is cool AF, and you can do a lot there for free. The equivalent from its main competitors are called AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions.