Quick & easy Web Service testing using PostBin – Revisited

If you’re into testing a web API by sending Post requests, there’s one service which offers this functionality quick & easy: PostBin

“PostBin lets you debug webhooks by capturing and logging the asynchronous requests made when events happen. Make a PostBin and register the URL with a webhook triggerer. All POST requests to the URL are logged for you to see when you browse to that URL.” [Source]

I’ve revisited PostBin & repeated the Multilingual support tests with several languages (E.g. French & Hindu) and it seems to work now perfectly! 🙂
However I’ve compared the results with the postbin.defenisio.com web service – and the latter seems to suffer from various encoding issues – See screenshot below of French & Hindu Strings in both services.

Also, here’s a nice & easy tool for sending HTTP Requests which can be used in combination with the PostBin or similar services.
Send HTTP Tool:
http://soft-net.net/SendHTTPTool.aspx
There are various others similar apps – feel free to drop your recommended app here. 🙂

In order to better illustrate the use of Send HTTP Tool software & the various web services I’ve decided to add screen-shots of each service.
In the gallery below I’ve tested HTTP requests on 3 similar services:

• Postbin
• Requestbin
• Posbtin.rb

Here are my comparison review of these services:

UI:
From all these 3 services Requestbin & Postin.rb seems to have nicer layout of data & both support the expand/hide of headers & content data.
Postbin rather seems to be more difficult to read in term of UI.

Multilingual Support:
From all 3 services only Postbin & Postbin.rb seems to support Non-English characters, while the latter suffers from various encoding issues (see screenshot below).
Thus currently Postbin seems to be the best choice for Multilingual requests.
Requestbin seems to suffer from internal error upon sending a POST request with Non-English characters (see attachment).

Functionality
All 3 services seems to function very similar to another. Post bin offers a simple POST requests viewer, while the other 2 services offers extended data of header/content viewer.
Additionally, Postbin.rb offers an automatic 15-seconds page refresh which proves to be very helpful as it avoids the need to manually refresh the page upon each POST request action.

Web Services Gallery:   

Cheers & Happy Testing!
Bernard.