Tools for quick ad-hoc testing of web services

[Clarence]

A couple of tools I usually use for quickly checking the response from
web services are: curl (on mac os x/linux - also available on Windows)
and fiddler2 on Windows. For those that don't know about these tools,
you might find them useful when working through examples in the SOD
book.

curl is a command-line based tool (see http://curl.haxx.se/) which
supports many protocols and can be used to perform CRUD operations
using HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE like so:

curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" -X GET http://localhost:9292/api/v1/ratings/users/5/up

curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" -X PUT -d '"up"'
http://localhost:9292/api/v1/ratings/entries/1/users/5/vote

Some good examples are here: http://blogs.plexibus.com/2009/01/15/rest-esting-with-curl/

fiddler2 can perform similar functions but has a GUI, see:
http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/